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Raspberry Pi 3B+ Hackable Linux Handheld
- james412 6y agoA veritable steal at only $629.99, truly emphasizing the philosophy of the Raspberry Pi project. I'd seriously consider this in favour of my next real estate purchase
- geek_at 6y agoeven though it's canadian $ it seems highly overpriced. A raspberry pi of the last generation for almost double the price of the current gen (36$)? And 3d printing 340$.. did the author mean buying the 3D printer too? Because I'm sure if you have a friend who has a printer they can print it for 10$ and they make a 8$ profit with that.
- teruakohatu 6y agoI think that might include the cost of a 3D printer required to print it.
- swiley 6y agoIMO: the pinephone feels very much like a handheld raspberry pi (It even has some IO on the back) and costs a sixth of this (although personally I’ve already found a couple kernel bugs on mine, on the other hand the original raspberry pi was way buggier so maybe I should be happy I haven’t found more.)
- 1MachineElf 6y agoMore than half of the cost is what the creator paid to 3D printing services in order to create the enclosure/related parts.
- Apofis 6y agoCommon, what's a mortgage payment between friends?
- abraxas 6y agoI want to build something similar but with bare metal Lua as an educational computer for kids. For all of the STEM toys on the market none have the magic of a 8 bit machine that boots to Basic. Except in this day and age Basic should be replaced with Lua.
- tyingq 6y agoThis ESP32 device already has keyboard and VGA ports on it. Though you'd have to port or bridge the existing JS vga library to Lua. And, it's $11. https://www.tindie.com/products/ttgo/lilygor-ttgo-vga32_v14-controller/ https://www.tindie.com/products/ttgo/lilygor-ttgo-vga32_v14-...
- mywittyname 6y agoI love the idea of this, but some time definitely needs to be invested in reducing costs. $340 for a plastic housing and some screws? That's ludicrous. I bet you could CNC some injection molds the cost of 2-3 of these chassis. If someone could do that and sell the housing for ~$30 each, this would be an impressive piece of kit.
- GordonS 6y ago$340 is more than the cost of the rest of the BOM, and it feels kind of crazy that the plastic housing would cost more than the electronics. I get that the parts are 3D printed, but are they being printed on-demand or something? I wonder if the 3D printing files have been open sourced - would be interesting to hear from a 3D printing enthusiast here about the costs (it's HN, there's bound to be many!).
- iso1631 6y agostl files are linked in a zip at the bottom. I've never touched a 3D printer before so I don't know what you do with them, the online 2d printers I see want me to create an account to generate a quote which seems tedious.
- rcar 6y agoSTL files are the 3D models that you put into your slicer of choice (which converts the project into the thin layers that the printer will gradually put down). There's a dozen things to print in the zip. I sliced 3-4 of them, and none seemed particularly heavy. Something like $0.50 of filament each for what I pay for PLA, which would put the whole thing at ~$6 of material. Perhaps the cost is being driven by some sort of print-on-demand costs? FWIW, you could also buy an Ender 3 for ~$200, and $140 buys a lot of filament, so you could get into the 3D printing hobby for less than the quoted cost.
- xsmasher 6y agoYeah, that might be the price to be 3d printed by a service. If you have the printer, the cost of materials should be ten bucks.
- x775 6y agoThis is super neat, but jeez the pricing is insane. How can the 3D printing be that much?
- aarongough 6y agoYeah I'm not sure about that either... All the parts look FDM printed too which is definitely way cheaper than that if you already own a printer. Perhaps they had some company print the parts? Honestly for that kind of money you're getting kinda close to having them SLS printed which would be much sturdier and look nicer...
- tudorizer 6y agoI assume a person or small team is trying to make up for the time spent desiging this? You can't just add up all the components, add 10% on top and expect a price level that competes with Apple. Looks like a hobby project to me and there is no harm in supporting the creator.
- iso1631 6y agoHalf the price is the 3d printing. Looks great though
- fnord77 6y agoI would love to make one of these with a full-size keyboard, without the touch and without the GUI. Just a term. Think tandy model 100. > 3D printing, filaments, etc. 340.00 Is this just for the cost of the raw printstock? Or does it include the price of a low-end printer?
- xouse 6y agoFilament is really cheap. Basic pla is roughly 2-3c a gram. I couldn't see this being more than 500 grams, so maybe $10-20 for filament, maybe $30 if you use abs or something. I'm guessing the rest of the price is paying to have it printed by a third party.
- Ninjinka 6y agoI've been looking into something like this, and it seems the display is the hardest part. I haven't been able to find a large monochrome LCD that is compatible. Now if you don't care if the screen uses a lot of power, is color, etc. then there are a lot of options similar to what you're describing on reddit.com/r/cyberDeck
- kingosticks 6y agoWould something like https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 be any good to you?
- Ninjinka 6y agoYes, it's almost perfect, it's just a little small (I'd prefer at least 6"x2" like the Alphasmart) and sold out.
- wanderingjew 6y agoYou can do it for ~$30-40. There are two problems: The screen, and the microcontroller. For the screen, you can just use a regular TFT, and only display one color. This has the benefit of bringing down the size of the frame buffer down from 800x480x8 or 16 to 800x480x1. That's still a lot of RAM for a microcontroller, but you can get displays with onboard graphics RAM, and any small microcontroller can use the on-board GRAM as a framebuffer. Line scrolling is a bit of a trip (kind of like a bubble sort, but on lines of pixels), and blinking the cursor is _weird_, but yeah, it can be done on a $1 microcontroller and a $5 screen. Anyway, here's what I'm working on: https://twitter.com/MrRobotBadge/status/1274490808616419328 https://twitter.com/MrRobotBadge/status/1274490808616419328 It's based on the VT-100. It's got a 69 key keyboard. The name VT-420 was already taken, so it's called the VT-69.
- mschuster91 6y agoSide question: why does just about every RPi display use HDMI and not the DSI port?
- Uehreka 6y agoA guess (based on my experience with RPi): It’s handy if you can debug your RPi peripherals using a “normal” computer to make sure they work. You can even develop an application on a desktop with a fast CPU (for faster compilation) and then ship it to the RPi when you’re done.
- Ninjinka 6y agoAt least as of 2017 the code to set the DSI parameters was closed source https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=188908 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=188908
- rasz 6y agohttps://github.com/anholt/linux/wiki/Raspberry-Pi-and-other-MIPI-DSI-display-panels https://github.com/anholt/linux/wiki/Raspberry-Pi-and-other-... https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/2521 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/2521 its possible, but hard and buggy
- neilv 6y agoI started to build a "compact" handheld RasPi 3B+, but the driver situation for all the shield-like display assemblies I could find (including the promising-looking one I gambled on buying) was very poor. The best I could find was "download our special build of Raspbian", which is a showstopper for my priorities. If there shield-like RasPi touchscreen open source drivers, mainlined in Linux, and also included in Raspbian and Debian, I'd like to hear of it. (Blob-free would also be nice, though the RasPi itself has blob problems, so isn't as good as it could be for open source.)
- jdc 6y agoHow long ago did you try? I think Adafruit's PiTFT should work fine for most use cases. EDIT: if you want to have a look at the installer script it's here: https://github.com/adafruit/Raspberry-Pi-Installer-Scripts/blob/master/adafruit-pitft.sh https://github.com/adafruit/Raspberry-Pi-Installer-Scripts/b... (the business end starts at line 222)
- pabs3 6y agoSome links for folks who want to work on fixing the blob situation: https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/itszor/vc4-toolchain/issues/7 https://github.com/itszor/vc4-toolchain/issues/7
- joezydeco 6y agoIt is a ruggedly designed... I get flashbacks to the college intern I interviewed that excitedly told me about the RPi telemetry design he created for a rocket. Got it all coded up and working great. After some prodding he confessed that it failed on launch. The micro SD connector couldn’t take the vibration.
- dTal 6y agoThat's odd - I've flown RPis on drones with far more vibration than the relatively smooth linear acceleration of a model rocket. In such setups it's recommended to directly solder power and USB connections, but I've never heard anything about the microSD connector. Did he say how he diagnosed the failure?
- DJBunnies 6y agoMaybe it was mounted poorly and the g force ejected it?
- joezydeco 6y agoThe suspected failure mode was vibration of the connector’s metal fingers away from the SD card’s traces, breaking off power and/or data.
- skykooler 6y agoGood to know for high-vibration environments. I may try epoxying the SD card into place for my telemetry experiments.
- _def 6y agoThey mention PLA, ASA and ABC filament. Never heard of ABC, do they mean ABS?
- rockyj 6y agoInspired by things like these, I bought a 5" LED display for my RPI. The idea was to display the time / weather on Chromium in a "kiosk mode". I was however surprised that with the latest install of Raspbian OS it was even hard to open a simple webpage on Chromium. It was just too slow. I would really avoid buying / building anything on a RPI from now.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoThat's Chromium on ARM under pure Linux, not necessarily an isolated RPi issue. I've found both Chromium and Firefox to be unusable on even Jetson with Nvidia graphics but a similar specced fan-less x86-64 Chromebook handles browsing with ease as Google has done a fantastic job in optimising ChromeOS. So browsing experience on ARM SBCs have left more to be desired largely due to lack of memory. Can anyone share their browsing experience on 8GB RPi?
- nbernard 6y agoI'm using Firefox on a 4GB RPi4 daily, without problem (with uMatrix that disables unneeded scripts however). It is a bit slow on media-heavy sites (youtube, ...). It tried the same software configuration previously on a RPi 3B+ (1GB): there, Firefox was quickly exhausting the RAM.
- tomcam 6y agoWait why not just write a clock program yourself? Was the point that you would also use Chromium once out of kiosk mode?
- rockyj 6y agoYeah, the idea was to just display a nice SVG + CSS + HTML clock with Chromium running in full-screen mode (screensaver off etc.). I know it is not the most efficient option but I was surprised that RPi struggled with opening a HTML page on localhost.
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- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoI recently found this project and I'm very excited about this DIY portable Linux computer trend and hope some of them graduate to mainstream. N-O-D-E recently announced one [1] and there is another RPi zero based phone project on Crowd Supply[2]. The reason I want a portable Linux handheld computer is, because the direction in which smartphones are moving towards is frightening to say the least. Smartphones are essentially mobile computers and for many parts of the world the first computing experience. COVID-19 situation has shown how mobile computing has been taken for granted and misery of those who have no access to it[3]. Can we imagine a computer manufacturer selling $2000 computer which will receive security updates for only 3 years if lucky, can't install alternate operating systems or software of our choice? Then why are we providing smartphone manufacturers with such privileges? With that unfair advantage they are dictating mobile computing for the entire world. I'm afraid it's just a matter of time, when this trend scale up and affects overall computing in general. [1]https://n-o-d-e.net/zeroterminal3.html https://n-o-d-e.net/zeroterminal3.html [2]https://www.crowdsupply.com/arsenijs/zerophone https://www.crowdsupply.com/arsenijs/zerophone [3]https://needgap.com/problems/149-remote-education-for-underprivileged-education-poverty https://needgap.com/problems/149-remote-education-for-underp...
- claudeganon 6y agoUbuntu also seems to run perfectly fine on the GPD Pocket 2: https://davejansen.com/installing-ubuntu-18-10-on-a-gpd-pocket-2/ https://davejansen.com/installing-ubuntu-18-10-on-a-gpd-pock... https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32968851612.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32968851612.html
- bluedays 6y agon-o-d-e seems to have the best designed project out of all of these. Like it looks like something I would actually want to buy. Though it does depend on the price. All of these hand-held devices look really attractive until you see the price. For instance, I love the design of the GDP Pocket, but that price keeps me far away.
- numpad0 6y agoRasPsion in red acrylic[0] is my favorite 0: https://images.app.goo.gl/sNcy4QBQwXDXmyVj7 https://images.app.goo.gl/sNcy4QBQwXDXmyVj7
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ppf 6y agoI bought one of those mini keyboard/trackpad things for my own battery powered rpi project. It sucked.
- jhbadger 6y agoYes, that's the downfall on all of these sort of things. Nobody seems to make a good mini keyboard these days. Back in the late 1980s there was the Poqet PC and it had a very nice typable keyboard. I don't know why we can't have something similar in terms of small keyboards, but as far as I can tell, nobody makes a keyboard like that now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poqet_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poqet_PC
- anthk 6y agoI would love a non-RPI based ARM palmtop with Linux or BSD. No, Gemini is too expensive. A device with a monochrome screen, 800x480 resolution, 3D case with a qwerty keyboard shoudn't exceed $100. They day a little netbook/palmtop arrives with Linux at a ridiculous price (the one of an RPI), it would be almost a second revolution as the zaurus. Portable Nethack/IF/SSH/IRC/Usenet + coding, PDF/image/video viewer with framebuffer support, cheap audio from a SOC if any. That would be my dream device.
- fit2rule 6y agoPyra Handheld? Open Pandora? http://pyra-handheld.com http://pyra-handheld.com https://openpandora.org https://openpandora.org Disclaimer: I love my OpenPandora!
- anthk 6y agoToo expensive. Even more today where devices much more powerful than the Pandora can be fetched by $20 without a screen/keyboard.
- numpad0 6y agoThat kind of thing had been my dream device as well, but once I get realistic it gets more and more akin to a random phone with PmOS with keyboard but only as a want item, except PmOS only runs on select(scarce) devices. I think the core of the problem is clunkiness of Android. e: I checked supported devices list for PmOS “just to be sure” — I was genuinely pleasantly surprised
- DarthGhandi 6y agoOdroid (probably the C2 model from what you've said) has far more bang per $ and could be hacked together for that price range.
- rootsudo 6y agois there any difference from a cutiepie or raspad? $629? As someone else stated, ouch.
- curioussavage 6y agoRegardless of what it costs to make at this price or really any I don't see the appeal. I used to get excited about similar projects but with how good my 2 pine phones are already and the pinetab that is getting delivered Thursday I already have functional sleek linux handheld devices with additional inputs/outputs.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoI guess I don’t see the appeal either, mostly because an 800x480 display seems painful. Getting either a Pine phone or Pine tablet sounds better. Do the Pine phones make sense just as Linux devices, not using them as a phone? I always travel with a small iPad Pro, and with Mosh, tmux, and a really powerful VPS from hetzner (which is so cheap I always leave it running), I feel I always have a Linux system with me that makes a practical writing and programming platform. Can the Pine phones be plugged into a large monitor?
- atum47 6y agoI thought about doing something like this. But I eventually went with modularization. I 3D print for my raspberry, another one for my 7' touchscreen and got myself a wireless keyboard / mouse. This way I can use each element separate. For instance, sometimes I use my PI as a server, so I don't need a screen or keyboard. I found myself wanting the screen decoupled from the computer as well, cause it can be used with other devices. Heck, I even played xbox on it once (not so great experience). Here's my setup if anyone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F88CSWH8SEY In this video, I'm using the PI as a retro game machine (I can swap the card to boot to other system)
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWhat's with that desktop? Is there no touchscreen / smallscreen friendly Linux desktop shell?
- teleforce 6y agoIt looks like a solid shell for RPi, it's just a shame that the price is a bit on the high side though. For an alternative hackable laptop like shell for RPi, consider the CrowPi2 [1]. It does not support touchscreen but the screen estate is much bigger (11.6") and can be configured with many sensors for testing and developing IoT based projects. As an added bonus the price is quite affordable for students and hobbyists. The review of CrowPi2 can be found here [2]. [1] http://linuxgizmos.com/hackable-crowpi2-steam-education-laptop-available-with-8gb-raspberry-pi/ http://linuxgizmos.com/hackable-crowpi2-steam-education-lapt... [2] https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/crowpi2-review-raspberry-pi-laptop-and-learning-kit https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/crowpi2-review-raspbe...
- tudorizer 6y agoSo many people complaining about the price have obviously never tried to build something similar and sell it. Why do you all expect free designs and then complain about big companies being unenthical?