DIY Raspberry Pi 1000 turns a Raspberry Pi 5 into a PC-in-a-keyboard | Hacker News Reader

DIY Raspberry Pi 1000 turns a Raspberry Pi 5 into a PC-in-a-keyboard

liliputing.com

65 pointsrcarmo12 comments

This is cute but I figure there will be an official RPi 500 sometime. I have a 400 and mostly like it. I just wish it had a built in pointing device, but even keyboards with those seem to have gone out of style.

Same. And it reminds me, one of the great things about the TrackPoint is that it adds no size at all. (Okay, still need buttons, but those can be small.)

I was recently thinking about this form factor... With the thermals of their high perfoming M series even in thin iPads now, Apple could absolutely make a "MacBoard" if they just wanted to, and it would also outclass so many Intel home PC's.

They do sell the Mac mini which is roughly the size of a router.

The next one is rumored to be only the size of an Apple TV, basically the M4 iPad Pro innards in a smaller box.

I'm going through the process of making a custom macropad myself. I used the rp2040 as the processor.

And now that the macropad is mostly complete, I do believe though that the next one I do will have an RPi or a CM4 compute module embedded inside of it.

There's some interesting concepts I'd like to pursue like, building a combo usb-c keyboard / cyberdeck. One idea I'd like to explore is reprogramming the cyberdeck on the fly as I'm typing.

Why would you need a CM4 in a macro pad? Isn't it mostly used to send keystrokes?

Let's say I want that CM4 to sync with BitWarden say and have it send keystrokes for passwords. I would also be able to create a strong password, and back that up to BitWarden without any issue.

Or I want to back up my keystrokes when interfacing to a computer.

Or I want to play retro emulated games while my code is deploying to the dev environment at work...

Or I want to use it as a platform for my own custom cyberdeck to take with me to conferences...

Or I want to create custom devices with nifty user interfaces that do one thing really well... maybe listen to GPS and send out a 10Mhz timing signal to my lab....

That is a lot thicker than I was expecting.

The thing appears to be 2"-4" tall.

Why can't it be like.. max 1" tall? :). Maybe esp32 PC? (Kidding)

I think the issue is the stacked hat instead of letting it be adjacent. There have been dozens of these computer keyboard projects and a lot of them are smaller.

> Above the HSF he added an official Raspberry Pi M.2 Hat, complete with a 128GB Ant Esports NVMe SSD.

Kind of gratuitous too, could've gotten any of the non-hat M.2 expanders.

If you (1) are broke to average financially (2) have no need for AI / gaming / 3D-modelling et cetera, then laptops & most PCs are a losers' game for you.

An ergonomic portable computer that can run emacs, lynx & imagemagick; made from entirely replaceable brandless parts, would cost between $10 and $100 to make.

FDE would provide reasonable security. Since you'd be able to get enough of these for the rest of your life for the price of one MBP, each device could have different profiles from "access social media of relatives" to "communicate through onion-nets." ALSO, would not it be cumbersome & costly to tamper 100 portable computers (probably leave evidence of your tampering techniques making them much less reusable)?

Old ThinkPads are still competitive for this role, but even they require somewhat special parts and have very long mainteinance manuals. Simple fixes are doable, but replacing the motherboard or screen approaches the level where it is better to simply buy new one.

There was https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/PICOmputer_Mothe

I wonder if the new microcontrollers could be used for a PC. Good mainteinance for years, $5 price...

I believe that a frugal (+ ergonomics-focused) approach to design instead of what MNT has done is the noble path. A minimal device may not really be a laptop, but with today's technology whatever it actually is, it certainly can be good enough to compute most programming, writing & internet browsing.

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