New things! Product reviews

I recently ordered some stuff in the post for an upcoming project: A real Raspberry Pi laptop. Not a screen in a flight case. Not a Motorola lapdock. A real, proper, nice-to-use laptop. I've been ordering some components off the internet, and I am hoping to get some more for Christmas. For those who are interested, it will use a B+ Pi, an HDMIPi screen, a USB track-pad off eBay, and a Pimoroni Display-O-Tron 3000 (or DOT3K), for added cool-factor and amazingness. This could also prove useful for coding too - I'll explain some more in the next update.

Also, I'd like to say a huge thanks to all the people who designed, made, supported, kick-started (I wasn't able to unfortunately) the HDMIPi. It's so wonderful to have something made specifically to work with a RasPi. No more internet guesswork, money wasting, de-soldering unnecessary parts. It also comes with a 5V USB Input plug! This is fantastic, as it's nigh on impossible to get readily available 12V batteries, and LiPos are quite unsafe, bulky, and need big (and quite expensive) chargers. THANK YOU!

So today (and technically yesterday and Tuesday too), four of the components arrived in the post.

                     ~Stuff Review!~

Firstly, I bought a Lumsing 6000MAh battery pack off of Amazon. I was originally planning on using a normal Lithium-Polymer(LiPo) battery off of the internet, which could have given me a full 11.1 volts, but the wonderful HDMIPi can run itself and a pi off 5V. The Raspberry Pi Spy used a similar battery pack in his portable pi build here, and when I asked him if this slightly cheaper and slimmer one would work, he thought it'd do the trick. I hope it will, as I do not have either the HDMIPi or a new B+ Pi yet. I bought this one, which at the time I bought it (last Sunday) cost me about £17, including shipping. They do fluctuate in price quite a lot, so it's worth checking and checking back from time to time. The battery pack is nice, it's brushed aluminium, painted blue (because why not). It comes with some quite funny translated-from-Chinese instructions, and a nice springy coiled up cable. It's really thin, but it does weigh quite a bit (4.94oz according to the website).It gives out 5V at a full 2.1A, and apparently can charge an iPhone 6 two times over.  It also has a slightly pointless torch light - not sure that's really incredibly useful to anybody but there we go. As I haven't got the remaining components yet, I'll have to do a Pt 2 review later when I have built the laptop, but the RPI Guy says that he got 2 and 3/4 hours out of it!

The second thing I bought was an HDMI Male-Female coupler like this one. It's going to be used to make the second HDMI imput port on the display's driver board more accessible, so that I can plug other stuff into the laptop and use it as an HD display. Because of the size of the keyboard, the screen and the driver board will be some distance from the edge of the laptop, so I got this to help make it more easy to use. In terms of a review, it's small, quite cheap and it works.

The third thing I got was a really really slim HDMI cable. HDMI cables are usually as thick as a hosepipe, and when it's inside a laptop that just doesn't seem practical - it needs to turn tight corners and coil up and things like that. I can't find the actual eBay item I have, as they seem to go on and off eBay quite a bit but you can find one by just searching for 'slim/thin/flexible HDMI lead' or whatever. Now, when they say thin, they mean thin. This thing is about as thick as a standard USB cable, if not thinner. When you look at normal HDMI cables, that is very impressive. I have no idea how they managed to squeeze however many cores into a cable that thin, but congratulations to whoever did it. It;s a really nice cable - it's thin, nice and short, and the plugs are quite small too. And it only cost about
£3.

The last thing is the best - the Pimoroni Slim Chiclet Keyboard. It's great - it's wonderfull slim, nice to type on and the keys make a rather pleasing clicky sound when you press them. It didn't cost too much (a whole £8 I think), and it will suit the Laptop perfectly. The keyboard is what makes it so wide - I really hate those mini keyboard which have buttons like a mobile phone, because if you want to type an email or whatever they're really not practical. My only gripe is that the cable is quite long - about 1.5 meters by the looks of things, but as Pimoroni's Jon pointed out to me on the forums, I will probably splice it at some point as there should only be four internal wires. The sticker on the back also says that it needs just 25mA, and the battery pack gives out 2.1A so the burn shouldn't be that heavy.

If you've got any questions, please comment below.

Thanks for reading!
Archie

Hi

Hi

I'm Archie, I'm 15, and I live in the UK. I love to build stuff in my spare time, from websites to carts.

I still regard myself as a beginner really - I  have fairly limited experience in most areas (electronics, python programming, web programming, arduino, woodwork, plastic-work, working with textiles....), but I'm better at some than others.

Most of what I learn comes from the brilliant online community. The best way to learn things in my opinion, is by doing them. Not by reading a book that tells you the right way to do things, but by looking at what other people have done, and amalgamating ideas, adding your own touch, learning from others' mistakes and generally developing over time.

I've started this blog as a means of showing others what I do (as some of my projects are pretty unique), and helping them learn from what I've done, and build stuff too. I want to 'put something back into the community', if you like.

I'm not going to commit myself to post every week/month/year etc, as I'll never stick to it and the main reason I build these things is for the fun of building them and to have a cool finished product, not to rush them in order to get a blog post up about them on the same day. That said, I will try and give regular updates on what I'm up to, and updates on my works in progress.

If you want to know some more details, or ask a question (however basic/complex - I'll try and help if I can!), then please get in touch with me in the comments, or on the contact page.

Have fun :)

Archie