Raspberry Pi Laptop/Tablet

From the start, the Raspberry Pi has always been one of the most innovative computers. The flexibility and applications for the device are what made this small computer from a small company popular. People have made all sorts of things with Raspberry Pi. Examples of this can be a desktop Raspberry Pi (Pi 400), a server, or even a tablet. But today, I’m going to build a Raspberry Pi Laptop. 

You might ask what is so amazing about this laptop, and it’s that it uses popular conventional parts. This includes the display (Official Raspberry Pi 7-inch screen), battery (Anker 10000 mAh Power bank) and the Raspberry Pi itself (Which in my case is a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB RAM). The software is completely for you to decide. In my case, I used Konstakang’s fork of LineageOS for Raspberry Pi, which is an open-source variation of Android. If you don’t prefer Android, there are plenty of other operating systems that you can use. Raspbian, the default operating system for Raspberry Pi can be used or a full desktop version of Ubuntu can be used (which is a first). You can even use Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi (which I don’t recommend for the time being because this is experimental). 

Putting the Raspberry PI Laptop together was not really that hard, and even the software wasn’t that hard to install, but there were a few small problems. The first problem was that there was no power button there. Luckily, LineageOS for Raspberry Pi has an addon that can have a button connected through the GPIO. The second problem was the case. Designing a case for a device is much harder than you think. Everything must be placed in a manner that can leave thermal headroom while being compact. This is why, for the time being, I haven’t gotten a case designed or printed.  This might be something I am going to do in the future, but for now, the topic is going to be untouched.  Since I don’t have a case, I haven’t decided on a keyboard to use for the project.  

Other than the case problems, the Laptop/Tablet has really good performance. The 8GB RAM upgrade was totally worth the extra performance. About all the time, Android ran at solid 4k resolution at 60 hertz. Even the gaming performance was decent. While performance was high, the battery life was solid. Overall, I think having a Raspberry Pi Laptop is a good idea, except my execution wasn’t the best. That’s all for this article, and thanks for reading.