Infinite Laptop with Raspberry Pi 4

The Raspberry Pi 4 has proven itself to be an amazing, useful, and welcome upgrade to the fine line of Raspberry Pi products. With it's Quad-core, up to 4GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB 3.0, it has catapulted itself into the forefront of the Single Board Computer market. Not only is a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 an adequate Desktop Computer, it can also be a super laptop replacement, as well.

The Pitop company has come out with a number of Raspberry Pi Products, and the best one is the PiTop CEED. The regular Pitop laptop that is currently available is not readily compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4. Mainly it's the fault of the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi Foundation made an unexpected change to it, in that they swapped the location of the Ethernet and USB ports. The Ethernet port used to be on the left, but it's now on the right. The PiTop was tailor-made for the form factor of the Raspberry Pi when the latest model was the Raspberry Pi 3B. Because of the tight, unforgiving cabling and plug-in boards, the current PiTop cannot accommodate a Raspberry Pi 4, not without some serious modifications.

But if you can find a Raspberry Pi CEED laptop (Not to be confused with the CEED Desktop), not only is the quality of the cables better, but everything is set up in a way that makes it possible to just plug in a Raspberry Pi 4 wityhout having to do any more than add an adapter plug or two.

On the left is the PiTop CEED's interface board that combines battery management, Display connectivity, and power pass-thru. On the right is the Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM. In the middle is the soon-to-be replaced HDMI-to-Micro-HDMI cable. I only had a 4-footer on hand. I have a 6-inch replacement on the way.

The ArkTek adapter is just a micro-USB to USB-C adapter for the power. It was pretty much the only extra thing I had to put into this, next to the HDMI-to-Micro-HDMI adapter. There is plenty of room inside for many different brands/types of adapters. You should be able to fit an SSD into this, if you even need one, since the Micro-SD card I have is 256GB.

The main drawback of the PiTop CEEDis how you connect ethernet and USB devices. Currently, there is just a gaping hole in the side of it, and you're supposed to just run your Ethernet and USB cables through it. You can slide the black tinted plexiglass panel out to stick your fingers inside to make the process easy, but ultimately, this needs a remedy.

As you can see, the placement of the hole, and the fact that it's not "fitted" to the form factor of the Raspberry Pi makes plugging in USB sticks and Ethernet slightly inconvenient. The size of the connectors varies, and because the hole is slightly offset, some USB devices just won't fit. I had to remedy this temporarily with a USB hub..

The reason I say that this is an infinite laptop is because if the Raspberry Pi 5, 6, and other future models maintain the same form factor, this laptop can be upgraded easily, by just swapping out the Raspberry Pi. You could upgrade the display, as long as the 14" display for laptops continues to be available. The only real drawback is the keyboard and trackpad. Just like with any laptop these days, the keyboard is custom and would have to be purchased from PiTop, if it breaks.

Update Dec, 2020

I revisited the original laptop after leaving it in my pile of projects, and made some much needed improvements, along the line of the list I made:

• Get an Ethernet extension cable to route the Ethernet port on the Raspberry Pi to the rear of the PiTop case.
• Get a USB 3 Hub to route the Raspberry Pi's USB 3 ports to the rear, to give a number of USB 3 and USB-C ports next to the Ethernet Port.
• Add a micro-HDMI-to-female HDMI cable to the Raspberry Pi's second micro-HDMI port, and have the female HDMI port stick out the back, so that external monitors can be used.
• Add a fan and drill some vent holes to keep overclocked CPU cool.

First, I moved the Raspberry Pi closer to the Power/battery/video board, so I'd have more room to put in the parts I wanted.

This worked out rather well, because it allowed me to have a large, unobstructed place to put in the USB 3.0 Hub. If the Raspberry Pi were in the original place, I'd have to contend with the cables and tiny wires built into the display and power board. By moving the Rapsberry Pi over, I have a place to cut the hole for the hub which doesn't interfere with anything else. It came close to the rightmost hinge, but since I was gluing the hub in place, there would actually be more stability there after I was done.

I am using this Inland brand USB 3.0 hub, because it was the thinnest one I could find, and had 3 ports on one side. Most other hubs I saw were either too long, too thick, or had only 2 ports on one side. This one was just right. I used a dremel tool with a circular cutter to cut the hole and this picture shows me slipping the hub into the hole.

Here is how the unit looks from the rear, with the USB hub poking out. I used Sugru to plug any gaps left by the unevenly cut opening. I've been using Sugru for years now, and it is my Go-To product for filling in gaps, giving wires extra protection from being pulled, and other things.

Here is how far the hub sticks out. I made sure that opening the display would not allow it to bump into the hub.

With the hub glued securely in place, I wrapped up the excess cables, and glued the Ethernet union to the base of the PiTop case. I eventually want to try adding an NvMe Sata drive, and it can still fit there right next to the ethernet jack and hub. If that works out, I'll have it booting off of it. Right now, though, it works fine with the 256GB Micro-SD. Speaking of the Micro-SD card, I installed Ubuntu 20.10, after a few weeks of testing it and it's predicessor, 20.14.

Finally, I added a FanShim from Pimoroni, so I can overclock.

So here is something I'm pondering now. I need ventilation otherwise the fan will not do it's job. On method you see here, is me covering the plexiglass cover with Masking tape in preparation for drilling vent holes into it. But then I thought about just cutting a square hole, and putting a mesh filter over it. Still another idea that came to me was just using sheets of plastic to craft my own case top, which would snap into place, and have holes for speakers, as well as a large mesh-filter for ventillation. I haven't decided exactly which one to use yet, but in the mean time, I can use it and continue testing things.

So for now, this is the finished product, until I decide on how to actually complete it. As an internet/travel computer, it's fun and functional. It does video, plays games, and so far, has been my go-to computer for when I go to family gatherings where I might need to hang around waiting, or need to show people something on the internet.

Remembering 1980's Computers and trends

So there was a discussion on Facebook that got me thinking about what I've lived through.

Someone posted a picture of a DEC Rainbow (circa 1982), Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) jump into the desktop/home computer market. The post said "Let's make it cost $10,000, and not be PC Compatible at all. We'll kick IBM's Ass!"

I thought "That's got to be wrong. I don't remember it being that way at all." So I checked a few facts on the Internet, and it turns out that it never cost $10,000, and that it was actually cheaper than an IBM PC with the same options. The Rainbow came standard with 2 floppy drives. The IBM PC cost more with 2 floppy drives.

Also, the Dec Rainbow was a machine that offered 2 CPUs -- a Z-80 and 8088, so that you could run C/PM, or MSDOS. At the time, "PC Compatible" was not seen as important as software compatibility, and OS Compatibility. By running C/PM and MSDOS, the Rainbow was able to be 2 PCs in one, and it also had native VT-100 capability, so it was literally 3 computers at the same time.

What I really started thinking about, though, was the whole decade of the 1980s, and what I experienced as I learned programming and got access to more machines.

In 1980, I was a sophomore at Salem High School, in Salem, Ma. I had failed Computer Programming 101 the year before, but the teacher, a Mr. Dolan, passed me, because he saw that I was really interested in the subject, and had a lot of passion for technology. He knew that I just needed a little more time for the fundamentals to sink in and make the lightbulb go off in my head. It was a good call, because in Summer school, as I re-did Algebra, and kept returning to the computer lab, everything happened. I understood Algebra. I understood it's place in programming. I went over the lessons that I failed the semester before, and I not only did the exercises successfully, I actually accelerated beyond Programming 201, which I was going to take after Summer school was over.

When I took Programming, I met a few friends. Dave, Chris & John. They were the alpha-nerds. They had admin accounts on the minicomputer, and were already programming assembly code. John actually owned a TRS-80 Model III. Then Dave got a TRS-80 Color Computer. I decided, that since I knew him, I should get the same computer, and we would be able to share software. I saved up $400 in paper-route money, and was able to buy the 4K Color Computer. At the time, I really wanted an Atari 800, but I didn't know anyone who had one, and it was almost $1000. That was a lot to someone who just had a paper-route.

Over the next couple of years, I learned all about graphics, made some games, made some music, and graduated high school.

This period between 1980 and 1984 was not the "PC vs. Mac" era. It was a time when everything was up in the air, and there was no real consensus on which computers, software, or Operating systems were the ones that were going to determine the direction of the industry. Not many cared about PC Compatibility, though admittedly, enough large manufacturers did -- but nobody knew if they needed to be hardware compatible or just software compatible with the IBM PC. With an OS like C/PM, for example, it didn't matter what your hardware was, because software written on one C/PM computer would work on nearly all others, because the Operating system was only linked to the Z-80 CPU. Since MS-DOS was based off of C/PM, everyone was thinking that making an MS-DOS compatible computer would be the thing to do, for similar reasons. For a while, this seemed like the case. Compaq made a mostly hardware compatible clone of the IBM PC, which, with a special version of MS-DOS and BASIC, could run most IBM PC programs. Heathkit and Zenith Data Systems also made IBM PC clones of a similar nature.

Then there was the DEC Rainbow, which ran both C/PM and MS-DOS, and was actually cheaper than the IBM PC. Into all of this were computers like the Atari 8-bit line, Commodore's VIC-20 and Commodore 64, TRS-80s, Timex-Sinclair's ZX-81, Coleco's Adam, and many, many more "home computers", which all cost under $1000, and all promised the future. The Timex-Sinclair ZX-81, which was a huge hit in the UK, was only $99. Sadly, it did not sell as well in the USA.

Between 1980 and 1984, I collected software for, and tried out many of the computers that were popping up everywhere. The IBM PC, Apple 2, and TRS-80 were still probably the top 3 lines of computers in businesses everywhere, and in schools, and apart from the obvious charm and games of Apple's graphics, nobody could tell which of the three (or indeed of all the others, as well) would be the go-to system that absolutely everyone who wanted a computer needed to have. Being too poor to afford a PC, an Apple, or a TRS-80 Model 3, I knew it would be a while before I could go with the flow when the flow happened. It simply hadn't happened yet. Even as I started attending Salem State University (it was just a college back then), the proliferation of TRS-80s, Rainbows, and IBM computers showed no sign of where things were going. They did have a lot of really antiquated Lear Siegler terminals hooked up to the Regents Computer network, but other departments had DEC minicomputers like my high school did, and they had the new VT220 terminals, which were faster and had more features than the VT52 and VT100 terminals which I used there.

Then, around my second year of College, in 1985, while I was a computer lab monitor, earning extra money in addition to my paper route, I met a guy who was the computer repair tech hired by my boss at the college. He'd come in and fix TRS-80 model 3 and 4 computers, and occasionally, monitors on some of the PC clones. While talking about computer stuff with him, he asked if I was considering building a PC or Apple clone. This was a new concept to me. I admit I wasn't really a big computer magazine reader, but that might not have helped. The PC and Apple clones were in the tiny ads found in many popular computer and electronics magazines of the time. He tipped me off that for a PC clone, I just needed to have a power supply, motherboard, graphics card, and floppy controller. So I did some research, and before long, I was looking for customers to sell computers to (I still couldn't afford my own). My first customer ended up being one of my computer programming professors, Dr. Lam. Dr. Lam was one of my favorite professors there, because he had a good sense of humor, and though he had a very thick accent, which led to misunderstandings, that was all incorporated into his humor and charm. If you misunderstood him, he'd likely realize it and make a joke of it, and before long, you sort of got him. I had him purchase the parts for his computer, and he called me over to come assemble them for him. Everything worked. $100 made! I had a few more customers, and was soon making my own computer -- just 2 floppy drives and a CGA card, which I hooked up to a tiny Sony studio monitor that I got from the trash. It had a CGA connector, and I easily found a cable for it.

Many things happened, but it was still just 1985/86, and where the market was going we still didn't know. Though the Macintosh arrived, and I had a PC and TRS-80 Color computer, and an Apple II clone, there were still so many computers on the market that IBM PC Compatible was just a bonus. Starting in 1984, there was news of a lawsuit filed by Apple Computer against Franklin Systems. Franklin's Ace 1000 computer was found to be in violation of Apple's Copyright, and as a result, all Apple II clones were pulled off of the market. However, IBM lost it's fight to protect the PC from clones. Here is what happened:

Phoenix and AMI were making BIOSes for various computers with hardware similar to the IBM PC, to allow them to have hardware and software compatibility with it. They did the smart thing, and did not try to reverse engineer or copy any part of IBM's BIOS. As a result, they were not sued, and clone manufacturers, for a small fee, could let Phoenix custom-make a BIOS for them. Between 1984 and 1986, a dozen or more PC Clone manufacturers got started, including Dell and Gateway 2000. It was at that time that I dropped out of Salem State College and looked for my first job building PC Clones. Even at this juncture, with Microsoft Windows on the market, then off the market when Apple sued them for it, it was still unclear. The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were just released, and they looked sharp. PC, Apple 2 and Mac graphics simply didn't compare to the Amiga or Atari ST. But in 1986, the VGA card came out, and suddenly, the PC became as good a game machine as the others. Soon, the Sound Blaster card would become available, and the PC would dominate both sound and graphics. It wasn't until around 1986-87 that the PC clone truly became the big winner of the computer race. Though Amigas and Atari ST's were still around, they would go extinct by the late 90's.

I also remember companies that I worked for, many of which are long gone. Cambridge-based Unitech, Comp-USA, Interleaf Publishing. Lots of PCs were built. Lots of Macs were upgraded and repaired.