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Pi to Go: Hot Raspberry Pi DIY Mini Desktop PC Project
MojoKid writes "Hot Hardware recently set out to design a custom mini desktop system with the popular Raspberry Pi single board computer. People have configured the device for a variety of applications, from micro-servers to low cost media players. Basically, the goal was to turn what is currently one of the cheapest bare-bones computer boards into a fully enclosed mini desktop computer that could be taken anywhere without the need for cabling or setup. This small DIY project is just one of many examples of the flexibility of the Raspberry Pi's open architecture. And to think you can even run Quake and Minecraft on it."
They used an off-the-shelf project box made the old way in a gloopy factory? Luddites. They should have 3D printed a case which would have taken days and weeks of design and tweaking and dozens of prototype runs. All that to end up with a ridged wobbly blob. That's the future.
This simply isn't newsworthy.
Beaglebone Black is more powerful, for similar amount of money.
Someone puts some electronics in a box and that's newsworthy???
If so, then I've got a suggestion for you. Just follow me around at work for a week and you'll get enough stories for a year of stories like this.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
With all the posts RPi s used in so many outstanding projects, it's certainly refreshing and newsworthy that someone is using it the way it was designed to be used, and running the software that it was designed to run!
Sorry, guy who used it to monitor sharks, you are just not as cool.
Buy a notebook computer.
The Raspberry Pi is not open hardware at the board level (schematic but no gerbers) nor at the SoC level (no full reference manual on the Broadcom BCM2835 device) nor at the boot level (booting and boot options are handled by the proprietary VideoCore IV) nor at the GPU and DSP levels (the VideoCore is entirely closed/under NDA). In fact, the only fully open thing about Raspberry Pi is its old and rather obsolete ARM11 processor.
So why exactly is anyone associating the word "open" with Raspberry Pi?
Far more open is the similarly priced BeagleBone Black, which provides full gerbers, full SoC reference manual, and full open source boot control (U-Boot). The BeagleBone Black's TI SoC does have a closed GPU, but since the board isn't aimed at running games nor consuming media like the Raspberry Pi is, it hardly matters. And the BeagleBone Black is far more capable in almost every other respect.
It's cool that Raspberry Pi has helped to bring ARM board prices down, but it shouldn't be called an open platform when it's mostly closed.
A desktop computer you can carry anywhere, someone should have thought of this 30 years ago. It really needs it's own category name don't you think?
.. hmm, they're just not *quite* right are they?
What about the 'kneetop' or perhaps the 'stomachtop' or maybe the 'palmtop'
well gee golly shit, here I am putting my computers in paper bags for the last 30 years, and its bout time someone made a computer that can run quake, its been sitting on my shelf for 17 years and no computer to run it
My project goal was to utilize what the raspberry pi was able to do and learn about linux programming on a small scale. I have plenty of computers that could be utilized if I needed a computer that is faster or has larger capabilities. -The Author
Doesn't anybody buy used computers? I get perfectly usable Core Duo machines from my local thrift store for $25 apiece, and they do a heck of a lot more than a Pi.
True, they weight a lot more, take up a lot more space, and they use a lot more power!
I'm not signing anything
Most of that weight and space are occupied by the monitor and the keyboard. However you minimize the motherboard, the setup cannot be smaller than these devices. A notebook also does a good job on protecting them in transport position.
without the need for cabling or setup
Unless you want a keyboard or mouse?
EIther way as others have said, this really doesn't seem newsworthy. We're talking about some very basic case modding and a little custom wiring here.
uhm, they wont mention it because it would defeat the whole purpose of RPI in the first place.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/about
"There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment."
The pi is about education, and part of that is the price. Its the price of replacing a whole board or simply swapping an sd card. The fact that you might plug one into a $2000 TV even is not the price we are talking about. Its about the cost of hacking the computer without worrying about its price.
You are perfectly correct: we should discourage people from entering the field of electronics by focussing upon advanced projects. Yes these projects are exciting to read about, but they are impractical for the novice to attempt building. It's impractical because it's too complex to understand, too expensive to botch, and tedious for those who don't have the construction skills. We should also discourage people from entering the field of electronics by instilling the mentality that it ain't worth trying if it ain't new, thus ensuring that any project is out of reach of the novice.
After all, we wouldn't want to encourage people to get into electronics by pointing to articles about stuff that they can actually try doing.
There are so many other SBCs out there, why does everyone keep focusing on this one particular...
Its actually a reasonable comment, and for future reference on that could have been made without the bad language(I do it for effect, but it rarely adds anything), Other boards (and Android TV sticks) provided real advantage over the pi from price, to power...someone even suggests openness, and many(including me) think it has sacrificed too much in memory, and CPU(for that price)...and for me misses a critical SATA header.
The reality is the best technology does not win, It gained support by having good intentions(and succeeding in them)...revolutionise Computer science education (hell its now made in Wales), and has become the the most supported board out there...there are three distribution for XBMC alone, and some really cool things done with it. I own one it works great
Indeed. However, power usage is something to consider. A model B RPi uses a piddling 3.5 W, whereas a Core 2 Duo E6850 by itself consumes nearly 20 times as much power (65 W). If you're running it 24x7, that's the difference between 17 kWh per month and 327 kWh per month. With an electricity cost at about 12 US cents per kWh (US average), that translates to a US$37.20 per month difference. The cost of the Pi is thus more than made up by electricity savings in just a month. Other factors, e.g. the fact that most Core 2 Duo machines will likely have fans and other moving parts that will reduce its overall reliability, that a Pi is much smaller overall, etc, are probably serious considerations. It really depends on what you want to be able to do. The one I bought sees use as a HTPC and home file server (among other things), and it is more than ideal for the purpose. I was considering buying an ITX Atom board for this purpose before I settled on a Pi: the power consumption was what decided the issue.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I couldn't agree more! And that's why I've owned notebooks as my main system for the past 3-4 years.
However with the price of power these days, a Raspberry Pi is probably the best bang for buck you can get when it comes to power consumption and usability combined. A Raspberry Pi will serve much better as a CarPC or low voltage system than any 2nd hand dual core desktop system, if you have the space and power at home for desktop systems, now worries then.
I've got 4 Pi's waiting at my office, 1 for my RC Car, 1 for my Quadrotor, 1 as HTPC and 1 to play with. Even a tiny desktop, failed-ITX for example, can't really be used on a quadrotor without a whole bunch of major power mods, on the other hand, the Pi is perfect for the task :)
I'm not signing anything
This would have been much cooler if they'd have VESA mounted the PI to the back of a slightly larger monitor and used their engineering skills to make a power supply and then hot glued that to the back of the monitor. Opposite the power brick they could have put some velcro and attached a multimedia keyboard/mouse combo controller.
Portable indeed.
It's an "all in one", like those touch enabled Windows 8 PCs that HP is trying to foist on us, except obviously without the Windows 8.
The linked computer looks very homebrew. It is of course still a nice diy project. (in diy the construction fun is as important as the end result, it is not really important that you can buy a cheap laptop). More attractive, I think, would be reusing an old all-in-one MacIntosh case for this. that would be really a kinda portable all in one computer. Seamlessly attaching a correctly sized lcd screen may be difficult, but that is the fun of diy. Perhaps this has been done already?
Keep in mind that iD, Epic and Crytek were all basically started by one guy who made almost all of the engine and game the first time around, then once money came in from smaller successes, they turned into the power houses we see today.
So in this analogy, how would "money come in from" a Raspberry Pi game?
Get a life guy, this has nothing to do with Apple and even mentioning it, or Tim Cook, is off-topic. There are many people on this site who have no love for Richard Stallman, myself included. I don't a rat about him or his dogma, and I don't care for having it shoved down my throat.
I like having the freedom to choose what license I want, without his or your input. Please keep your software religion to yourself.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Please check your math, it's an order of magnitude off. Often whole houses don't draw 327 kWh/mo.
Per my calculations, R-Pi will cost 30 cents/mo, and an E6850 will be $5.70/mo. However if you close the lid of the notebook it draws much less, about 23-25W, and then the costs drop down to about $2.50/mo. Nobody worries about such a piddly expense.
For example: 3.5W * 24 hrs/day * 30.5 days/mo = 2.562 kWh (30.744 cents/mo.)
$42, but free shipping so I'll let that slide - no ethernet or GPIO, but does have built-in WiFi and 8GB flash storage and includes a mains adaptor. Will run Linux (with hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES) via the unfortunately-named Picuntu.
Interesting. Anyone got anything better?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
>And lets get one thing clear, without Linus and Linux, you wouldn't even have any clue who RMS was
I've cut your personal attacks on me(oh no you called me a zealot what will I do...against someone writing 13 paragraph rant), and your hatred of GPL(I am sorry that some programmers don't want to program free for Apple). I'm surprised you didn't realise that GCC is a big deal, Apple have being trying to get rid of it for years :).
What is ironic is Apple subverted BSD so easily by buying off the main programmers, and handing out a few Apple laptops they destroyed the real BSD community rather than nurturing it. You can get (real)Unix with vastly improved performance simply by running a mixture of GNU and Linux (built under different ideals under one license.) GPL wins again.
Say it you loooove apple. xxx. The fact that GPL won and well BSD lost is history. Apple should have learnt to share, or chosen the kernel by Linux under Stallmans linus...lie that other operating system. The one with 1.5Million activations a day...runs on the Pi too...Android :) I notice its desktop figures continue to rise as well unlike Apple (down 22% and 2% woops)
The bottom line is Apple should have shared. Its part of their downfall. The sad fact is Apple would have been better aiming for the Microsofts Market share instead on Linux...will they never learn. Cant help think your graphics and file system performance are a little slow :)
I hope your shares do better...maybe you should try Microsoft instead.
You could easily end up spending more on electricity than on the computer - especially if you use it as a server.
If you want a generic portable computer with an ARM CPU, buy an Allwinner-based tablet. Those use the Allwinnner system on a chip, which has an ARM core and costs about $7 in quantity. They're under $70 in the US, around $30 in Shenzhen.
"fully enclosed mini desktop computer that could be taken anywhere without the need for cabling or setup"
So, basically, a laptop?
Seriously -- how is that news? People have been doing it for years now. Here is a random google link from 2012: http://blog.parts-people.com/2012/12/20/mobile-raspberry-pi-computer-build-your-own-portable-rpi-to-go/
I had these issues to begin with. But then I used a better power supply and these issues went away. The quality of the power supply unit really does affect how reliable your Pi is. I'm aware that the way they implemented USB power is far from ideal, but they have achieved the goal of producing a (quite surprisingly) powerful computer for $35.
Mine has been running for months with no downtime. It's a Samba4 domain controller, Horde groupware mailserver, DNS server, web server, SNMP poller (running Cacti), print server, and it runs Crashplan to automatically back up data from my family's PCs to an attached USB hard disk. I know I'm not the original target market for the Pi, but dammit I *like* mine, I think it's perfectly good at doing what it does for my needs, and I know I'm not using anywhere near its full capabilities (the GPU component of the Broadcomm SoC is supposed to be surprisingly powerful). It's also silent and draws very little power - which is why I used it to replace the old AMD Sempron box that was doing the same set of jobs previously.
Sure, it's not running the latest version of the ARM processor, or running the Ethernet connection independently from USB. But then if it did, it'd be larger and would cost more to build. Cut them some slack; they're doing something amazing - they're getting kids interested in how computers actually *work* instead of just using one to check their Facebook pages, and it's cheap enough that it doesn't really matter too much if they damage it.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
there are better solutions. RPi in a plastic case? where is the news?
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Well, any $99 Android tablet really. You get the screen for the price.
While your electricity cost calculations are a bit off, you have a point there: many people have way overpowered machines running HTPC/server setups, and could easily save a lot of power there.
There are several more projects out there that are far better then this, Slashdot now just copying the crap from Hack A Day now?
https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+Pi+laptop&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=g5qsUcb7GbT_4AOfh4DwAg&ved=0CFAQsAQ&biw=1600&bih=785
They used a random enclosure that was laying around, added a function that is not needed for any reason (ATA power shutdown? really, on a 5 watt device?) and simply glued a car monitor to the top.
Tomorrow on Slashdot, Amazing hack on using peanut butter AND jelly in a sandwich. We cover what sides of the bread you spread it on and the amazing assembly trick to pull this off.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But for which platforms are people willing to buy games made by one person, especially if they're not point-and-click?
Google Play
Devices with access to Google Play use a touch screen as their primary input device. Touch screens are good for point-and-click games, not so much for platformers and other games that depend on a gamepad. I tried the demo of a Super Mario-inspired platformer called Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7 tablet and I couldn't get a feel for where my thumb was on the on-screen joystick. It'd be like trying to play Super Mario or Mega Man with just a mouse. What free or inexpensive Android game on Google Play would you recommend as an example of how to implement directional control well on a flat sheet of glass?
Xbox Live Arcade
I was under the impression that it took tens of thousands of dollars to get a game reviewed and a relationship with a traditional publisher in order to get a "slot" on XBLA. Or by "Arcade" did you mean the C# ghetto called "Indie Games", which isn't even available in most countries?
Steam, GOG
Are there dos and don'ts for getting a game greenlit, especially if it isn't in a genre that traditionally uses mouse control?