laptop projects

My ongoing laptop-like projects:

pi 4
pi zero 2w
orange pi zero 2w

pi 4

The pi 4 wasn’t originally going to be a laptop project, but I got a nice display as a gift. So I mounted the pi 4 to it and soon had a very useable Hyprland setup. I couldn’t get the gesture pane swapping to work, but then I don’t really like touching the screen anyway.

pi zero 2 w

The pi zero 2w is the real system. I started on a smaller, wider display, but now I have it mounted to the back of an ElecLab 7 inch 1024x600 display. It has additional ports, like RS232, and some kind of 3G/4G cellular modem slot. I have a radio hooked up to one of these displays, so I may have to look into finding out what kind of modem could go in there so I can bridge that radio with the internet independently of my regular connection.

It also has capacitive touch, but with only 512MB of RAM I dont run a display server, so that feature is unused. It also has built-in speakers and cabling options for connecting such that I don’t have to run as many cables. I can apply 5v power to the screen to power to pi or to the pi to power the screen.

I chose to apply power to the screen and use an in-line switch to toggle that on and off. This sits between the screen and a battery bank. I have tried a number of battery banks, even the ones supporting pass through charging interrupt the circuit when external power is applied to the bank or when detached.

For a keyboard I have been swapping my smallest keyboard between systems; an Epomaker TH40. I am eagerly awaiting a Keyboardio Preonic. I am undecided if I will use that or the Atreus as the more permanent solution.

orange pi zero 2w

I basically just wanted a pi zero 2w with 4G of ram so I could run Wayland for Chinese input. I have spent quite a while trying to find a way to make fbterm/fcitx work but the documentation kind of sucks and there isn’t much to be found online about it. I didn’t really look before I leapt, and NixOS isn’t well supported on this board. So far I’m running Armbian/Bookworm and using the Nix package manager.

I was going to try Ubuntu. Ubuntu didn’t make it out of the initial ramfs, but Debian seems to be doing okay. The packages for generating a NixOS configuration aren’t working as expected, but at least I can boot it up to Debian Bookworm and then use the Nix package manager for the programs I want to run.

I’ve quite a bit more stumbling around to do with it.

why more than one?

A lack of vision? Or an inability to pin down exactly what I want to use them for. I float between all of them, using some shared elements. Like Neovim, Gemini browsing stuffs, and they all have my notes repository. Thanks to the magic of git I can keep those in sync. Speaking of, I should probably publish, it’s been a while.

Tags: index

Navigation

index