A man in glasses and a black sweatshirt sits in front of an orange and black computer screen just below eye level at the table in front of him. His keyboard sits on the table below. He appears to be in a park as there are trees and grass in the background.

Flying Lotus Is A Framework-Powered Portable All-in-One Computer

August 24, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 12 Comments

One of the things that we love about the modern era of computing is the increasing ease by which you can roll your own custom computer, as seen with the cyberdeck phenomenon. The Flying Lotus is another awesome build in this vein.

Built around the Framework ecosystem, this device was built to suit the very specific use case of its designer, [Carlos Aldana]. He found himself traveling a lot and that the ergonomics of a laptop left a lot to be desired, especially when in the air. Add to it the fact that he has trouble typing on typical laptop keyboards for any length of time, and you can see how an ergonomic keyboard plus a laptop just doesn’t really work on a tray table.

The Flying Lotus takes the screen, modular ports, and mainboard of a Framework laptop and puts them into a single computing block that can be hung from the clever tabs at the top or mounted on a stand that puts the screen at a more ergonomically ideal height from the work surface. [Aldana] describes it as an “iMac that’s portable.” Since it doesn’t have an integrated keyboard, you can run it with whatever keyboard you like from super duper ergo to a teeny game controller sized unit.

We’ve talked about why we like Framework so much before, and if you’d like another take on a modern portable computer, how about this portable Mac mini?

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A very wide beige laptop sits on a wooden table. A hand manipulates a teal ball in a semicircle attached to the right sided of the device. The track ball and hand are outlined in white.

A Trackball Retro Laptop

August 19, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

While track pads and mice dominate the pointing device landscape today, there was a time when track balls were a major part of the scene. In order to really sell the retro chops of his portable computer, [Ominous Industries] designed a clip-on style track ball for his retro Raspberry Pi laptop.

Starting with a half circle shape, he designed the enclosure in Fusion360 to house the guts of a USB trackball. Using the pattern along a path feature of the software, he was able to mimic the groovy texture of the main device on the trackball itself. Flexures in the top of the track ball case with pads glued on actuate the buttons.

We appreciate the honesty of the cuts showing how often the Pi can get grumpy at the extra wide display in this video as well as the previous issues during the laptop build. The bezel around the screen is particularly interesting, being affixed with magnets for easy access when needing to work on the screen.

Retro portables are having a moment. We just covered the Pi Portable 84 and previously saw one inspired by the GRiD Compass . If you’re more interested in trackballs, maybe give this trackball ring or the Ploopy trackball a look?

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Three different keyboard devices with greyscale LCDs on top are on a white table. In the back left is a beige one with grey keys, front and center is a black model, and to the right is a translucent blue model with black keys being held up by a hand.

A Brief History Of AlphaSmart

July 29, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 18 Comments

There are a handful of gadgets that do one thing so well that they become cult classics long after the company that made them has moved on or closed up shop. [This Does Not Compute] takes us through the history of the AlphaSmart word processor which started as an educational tool, but finds itself in many a writer’s bag today.

The original AlphaSmart bears more than a passing resemblance to its Apple contemporaries since the company was founded by two Apple engineers. The Cupertino company didn’t see the value in the concept, but didn’t lean on any non-competes to keep the pair from pursuing the idea on their own time either. What resulted was a dead simple word processor that could be had for 1/5 of what a new computer typically cost in the era, which was particularly attractive for the target market of schools.

After several successful years, the pressure of PDAs and then smartphones from one side and cheaper laptops from the other meant school districts no longer wanted single-purpose devices when they could have a fully-fledged computing experience for students. We wonder if that was the right call, with so many now wanting distraction-free devices, but it was the end of the road for the company either way.

Our own [Kristina Panos] and [Tom Nardi] have shown us the guts of the Neo and of one of its competitors, the Writer, respectively. If you have a Neo of your own in need of replacement keycaps, you can print them.

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Printed Portable Computer Inspired By The Classics

July 28, 2024 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

These days, laptop computers are all more or less the same, at least externally. Some are thicker than others, they might come in different colors, or with a 360° hinge that lets you flip the screen around the back and use it as a tablet, but overall they’ve all got the same shape and proportions. The industry, and indeed the users, eventually agreed on the best way to make a computer portable and are now fully committed to it.

But that wasn’t always the case. In the 1980s there were a number of laptops from the likes of Toshiba, Tandy, and even IBM that took a slightly different approach to the clamshell design. These computers featured ultra-wide displays with a hinge located closer to the center of the computer, giving the machine a distinctive “trunk” in the back. It’s these classic machines that clearly inspired [Michael Mayer] to design the Portable Pi 84.

[Michael] says that the 3D printed enclosure was largely designed around the 40% ortholinear keyboard, which itself is based on the Happy-Keyboard from [Luis Alegría]. The rest apparently just fell into place, such as the fact that the 1600 x 600 Waveshare 9.3 inch display happens to be almost the perfect size to cover the keyboard below it.

Compared to many of the other custom computer builds we’ve covered, the rear compartment of the Portable Pi 84 provides ample free space for the various system components. That includes the Raspberry Pi 4 that runs the show, a UPS “hat” that powers the system via a pair of 21700 batteries, and even a set of amplified speakers. It looks like there’s still plenty of room in the back for additional gear, such as an RTL-SDR or perhaps even a cartridge slot.

A particularly nice feature of this build are the inset panels on the rear of the machine, which allow for the various ports and connectors to be reconfigured by the user without having to re-print the entire case — one could imagine a replacement panel that features a connector for an external WiFi antenna, for example. We also like the use of heat-set inserts throughout the case, which will not only make the build sturdier, but means the case can be opened and closed regularly without fear of stripping out the screw holes.

So is this a computer or a cyberdeck? It’s hard to say. We tend to think that a proper deck needs to have a more unique physical layout, and technically this form factor was actually fairly popular at one point. But whatever you want to call builds like this, we’re stoked to see them become more common and better documented. Long live the truly personal computer.

The Next Evolution Of The Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit

April 16, 2024 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

At Hackaday, the projects we cover are generally a one-off sort of thing. Somebody makes something, they post it online, we share it with our audience — rinse and repeat. If a project really captures people’s imaginations, it might even inspire a copy or two, which is gratifying for everyone involved. But on the rarest of occasions, we run across a project like [Jay Doscher]’s Recovery Kit.

To say that the Recovery Kit was an inspiration to others would be putting it mildly. Revolutionary would be more like it, as it resulted in more “Pi-in-a-Pelican” builds than we could possibly count. So it’s only natural that [Jay] would return to the well and produce a second version of his heavy-duty cyberdeck.

Continue reading “The Next Evolution Of The Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit” →

A "portable" computer in a grey enclosure. There is a small CRT on the left hand side of the face of the enclosure and a disk drive and a couple ports exposed on the right hand side. The keyboard is attached with a purple cable. A black cartridge with a grey and red label sticks out of the top of the enclosure.

Portable MSX2 Brings The Fun On The Go

April 11, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

Something of a rarity in the US, the MSX computer standard was rather popular in other parts of the world but mostly existed in the computer-in-a-keyboard format popular in the 80s. [Aron Hoekstra aka “nullvalue”] wanted to build an MSX2 of their own, but decided to build it in a period-appropriate luggable form factor.

This build really tries to make the computer as plausibly vintage as possible including an actual CRT for the display instead of using an easier to obtain and package LCD. Computing is accomplished with an Omega Home Computer MSX2 SBC by [Sergey Kiselev] which uses components that could have been found when the MSX computers were in production. While 3D printing wasn’t widespread in the 80s, we can assume any of the plastic parts like the internal mounts would have been injection molded instead.

An impressive number of different techniques were used to bring this computer to life including PCB design, 3D printing, CNC, and plenty of soldering. After some troubleshooting on the 50 pin cartridge connector and all the assembly, [Hoekstra]’s Mega Omega MSX2 Portable Computer makes for a very impressive reimagining of the MSX platform that feels like a product that might have actually existed at the time.

If you want more MSX hacks, checkout how to add a Wii Nunchuck or PS2 or USB keyboards to your MSX.

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A Raspberry Pi Handheld Computer You Might Want To Use

August 27, 2022 by Jenny List 49 Comments

Amid the many wonderful form factors being explored by the makers of cyberdecks, there’s one that’s emerged which harks back to an earlier generation of portable computers: the handheld pad with a keyboard. These units are typically around the size of a hardback book, with the upper half being a screen and the lower a keyboard. The latest to come our way is from [Richard Sutherland], and it’s a very tidy pad computer indeed.

Inside the well-designed layered 3D printed case is the frequently-chosen Raspberry Pi 4, along with a PiSugar power supply board and 5,000 mAH battery and a 4.3″ touchscreen display. The keyboard has seen a lot of care and attention, featuring high-quality tactile switches that follow the Miryoku keyboard layout. He says it’s a thumb-typing keyboard, but anyone looking for more can either adapt the design to their liking or simply plug in an external board when faster typing is needed.

We like the pad computer trend as it offers useful computing power in a far more convenient format than a laptop, and we think this is a particularly nice one. It would be nice to see where people take this design, and who knows, we might give one a try for writing some Hackaday articles. If you’d like to see more pad computer goodness, we recently showed you one built in the shell of a classic Amstrad.