DIY Pi notebook

Not even sure where to start this. I’ve been on a long journey of trial and error with lots of devices to be able to use RO away from the desktop. Most of the hardware I’ve tried to use has either failed or I have hit a dead end. So I’m starting to work on scavenging bits and pieces to put together something portable. Just now saw my most recent success reading from an undocumented blob chip based synaptics touchpad pulled from a broken laptop.

I’ve got some keyboards roughly the right size. Batteries aren’t hard. Powerbanks are a reasonable solution. Storage isn’t an issue either. I’m looking at grabbing a small ATMEGA32U4 based module to set up a custom PS/2 to USB HID adapter for the touchpad. The sticking point is an LCD. Online they are either small or expensive. Or both. Makes sense of course. There is an LCD I wanted to use from a recently deceased 386 notebook, but the datasheet doesn’t seem to exist. Such a shame because I have the datasheet for an extremely close relative with a different pinout. Using a uC as a go-between for an SPI interface would have been doable. I like mono LCDs. I’m weird. What can I say.

If I was desperate enough to want wireless networking an ESP32 could be leveraged for that, although I feel it is a bit of overkill.

Pi Tops are just way, way too expensive, and overkill for what I want.

What are people’s thoughts?

The sticking point is an LCD. Online they are either small or expensive. Or both.

What size and resolution, and what cost, would you find acceptable?

What is your overall cost limit?

I assume you would do quite a bit of DIY.

If I was desperate enough to want wireless networking an ESP32 could be leveraged for that, although I feel it is a bit of overkill.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/153105075527

Steve – what magical incantation did you use to get rid of the dupes?

I changed the .co.uk to .fr and saw this (among other things):

Malheureusement, l’accès à cet objet a été bloqué en raison de restrictions légales en vigueur dans certains pays.

Humph.

What size and resolution, and what cost, would you find acceptable?

I’m really not sure entirely. The issue does tend to lie with screen size, not resolution being a major cost deciding factor.
When it comes to a laptop, the screen would probably be situated maybe 50cm away from the eyes at a rough guess? I suppose I found the eee701 to have about the minimum usable screen size. According to the modern oracle it’s 8.9".
Using my old Chinese tablet with the 7" screen and a keyboard like a notebook proved to be challenging.

What is your overall cost limit?

As low as possible really. I repair or strip and repurpose as much as humanly possible.

I assume you would do quite a bit of DIY.

Relatively speaking, it’s my strength.

That’s the cheapest Vonets I’ve seen by a very wide margin. I looked last year and flatly decided “No”. Mind you, with the AUD being what it is currently, I’m not really sure.

In trying to work something out I’ve met defeat a few times.
Dug out the old Toshiba Satellite. It’s just plain dead.

My slow as dirt netbook is exactly that. It also doesn’t always boot and suffers from random hardware failures. Most notably the Wifi.

The eee701 took me many, many attempts to get an OS to stick. Then it died.

The Chinese tablet faired reasonably well with keyboard, and using the Linux branch (as opposed to Linux2) of the RO Linux port. However no middle click.

My ASUS TF700T works surprisingly well with a horribly outdated, non upgradable version of Ubuntu. Except I nuked android booting in the process. Oh well, It’s fixable.
It too runs the Linux branch of the RO Linux port, except there are two problems. One is the lack of a middle click for touchscreen or trackpad. The kernel modules for that version of Ubuntu just don’t support it. Plus the TF700T screen is glorious! Which means that the RO Linux window has to be tiny so it runs acceptably.

Oh, I also tried running RO Linux in Raspbian on my Pi Zero as a USB gadget running an RDP session, as it seems to be faster than VNC for some reason.
I don’t recommend this. It’s all too much for the poor Zero to handle all at once.

So this is my next attempt. To cobble together a thing that can run RO natively, have a keyboard, trackpad and a screen.

Going a little off topic again I went digging in the shed to see what old hardware I could come up with. I don’t have the heart to do anything with it. I found a 286, a couple of 386 and a couple of early pentium notebooks. I guess they are kind of rare-ish now.

I’m sure you are aware of the Motorola Lapdock which has to be the easiest and (IMHO) best looking portable solution for RISC OS using a Raspberry Pi. It’s capable of running @ 1368×768(?) resolution for around 5-6hrs on battery, comes with a decent keyboard & trackpad (using the LH ctrl key for menu) and it’s fairly compact.
The main drawback (for me at least) was that it’s a bit fragile thanks to the RPi sticking out dongle fashion and constantly connecting/disconnecting is pretty hard on the Pi.
Obviously it’s not quite as cheap as using whatever you can get your hands on from the parts bin. ;-)

Steve – what magical incantation did you use to get rid of the dupes?

Ordinary users don’t have the privilege to delete even their own postings. It was me who tidied them up.

Here are some thoughts.

As Patric also suggests, my preferred solution is the Atrix Lapdock, which can be set up as a very neat machine. Unfortunately, you have missed the option of a cheap one by some time, and they may not have been available where you are.

If you have a reasonably good laptop, then you can VNC from a Pi on a cable link. This would not be any good for intensive work, but is fine for general editing etc. I regularly VNC over 3 floors on WiFi to a portable at 1920 × 1200. The are some gliches, but it is quite useable.

The official Pi screen would be too small, too low resolution and too expensive, but is easy to use and good looking with a case.

Other screens that accept HDMI and have reasonable size and resolution might be £80-100. The use of laptop screens has been discussed many times on the Raspberry forum and there should be some good links there.

I don’t think we ever saw the Atrix Lapdock in Australia. Looking at the prices on international items on eBay the chance of getting a reasonably priced one has long gone. The postage on them too… $100 postage is a little steep.

Obviously it’s not quite as cheap as using whatever you can get your hands on from the parts bin. ;-)

Absoluetly, but almost everything I have is so very old, and / or proprietary.

I have the remnants of the notebook I butchered. I haven’t stripped the screen portion yet. Perhaps I could see if our friends on AliExpress sell a driver board for it. Trouble is it’s kind of big. e: 15.6" according to the Internet.

I just found that I made it to the top of the queue for a Pinebook! ….and my code has expired. I am …not happy.

What are people’s thoughts?

One solution is software. Buy a Chromebook or a Pinebook, put Linux on it and use the Linux version of RISC OS. Unfortunately no ready to run packages of ‘RISC OS on Linux’ are available. I hope this port will be official with RISC OS 5.26.

made it to the top of the queue for a Pinebook! ….and my code has expired

That’s mighty convenient.

The more I hear about this company….

Unfortunately no ready to run packages of ‘RISC OS on Linux’ are available.

Not finished, but ready to run: https://github.com/TimothyEBaldwin/RO_Linux

Some support code is compiled with standard Linux tools, but DDE is not required.

That’s mighty convenient.

No. It wasn’t them. Unfortunately I wasn’t really able to access the email or do much of anything during roughly that period, so I had no idea until I could check the email today :(

A chromebook isn’t going to happen. I can only speculate that it took quite some time for them to penetrate the market here.
The portable ARM hardware I have is old, with similarly old Linux kernels. 2012 and older.
Building the Linux 2 branch is problematic on ARM. Running it just as much so. QEMU on a low powered ARM device is somewhat unpleasant.

you can VNC from a Pi on a cable link

I was moved by thinking about this to return to a topic from 5 years back .

Since then Jeffrey has produced vncserver and there is the front end !VNC.

I do not think this is what I will use regularly, but here is an elderly Pi B+ set up and in use. It has Internet, as you can see. It is a 1920 × 1200 screen.

QEMU on a low powered ARM device is somewhat unpleasant.

That shouldn’t happen. The detection code assumes QEMU is appropriate if RISC OS won’t run without it, it used to give the wrong results if Bubblewrap doesn’t work.

That shouldn’t happen.

I can only tell you observations, not reasons because TBQH I couldn’t work it out. I found QEMU being called to be sensitive to some really odd factors like the method of execution. Via various terminals, ssh, xorg terminal via tunnelled ssh, VNC, and RDP all seem to have some effect on it. It’s why I’ve asked for some kind of nice flag like —force_disable_qemu to gag it when it flares up.

What exactly is the mechanism for bubblewrap detection. It seems to be something else besides trying to run bwrap. Or maybe I should ask what does it require? I’ve built and installed bubblewrap from the repository on a few test ARM based machines because of lack of native package. Sometimes the kernel is just too old. Can’t be helped. Sometimes things are good, and it happily passes the included tests, yet the RO Linux build invokes QEMU. I’m sure I’m just stumbling across edge cases. But I do have to say that it’s easy to build the original “Linux” branch, and very difficult to build the “Linux2” branch natively.

Back on topic, the PINE64 people were nice enough to help me out so I’ve made an order. Terrible time for me to be dropping cash on something, but right now I’m just the king of failed hardware. I also have barely had access to my computer desk. When I do it’s usually because it doubles as a repair desk for doing rushed electronic / electric repairs.

Steve, using an ethernet bridge cable never occurred to me! What an interesting idea.

The Pi Zero gadget idea was like the Rube Goldberg version of that. It had two failing points though. Both my notebook and pi zero were kind of under-specced. Also setting up a Pi Zero as an ethernet gadget and getting it to work with a given computer can range from finicky to inexplicably impossible.

Now, if I were serious about pursuing the gadget idea, the next thing I would try and probably ultimately fail at would be to use an Orange Pi Zero. Nothing like the Raspberry variety really. However it is small too and has a USB OTG connector. The main difference in considering it would be that it is quad core. Now I think of it, the OPi PC and PC2 I have also have an OTG port. None of which I have ever actually used.

I’ve wanted to do the Portable Pi thing for ages so I’m still persevering with it. What would be really amazing is if I could fill a nuisance hole in my knowledge about the RO graphics subsystem. I’d love to know how to set something up so I could use a GPIO based framebuffer device. I know Rick did an OLED module (which I have used), but it still leaves me wondering how to copy the main framebuffer out.

Steve, using an ethernet bridge cable never occurred to me! What an interesting idea.

As a naif with networking I had to pull together a few strands of help, but now I have set it all up this time, with networking and file sharing, I am really quite liking it.

The hardware was just what I had on the shelf, so that might bear some thinking about. I guess RISCOSBits latest si.zeRO would be ideal, but is a bit costly for me and I can make up something almost as small for very much less.

use an Orange Pi Zero

That would be RISCOSBits Whispy. It is a very neat idea and works, but I have had some problems with consistent connections, which might be the board itself. The OP Zero from China is only the same price as a Raspberry Pi Zero with carriage.

My preferred wireless solution now is a Vonets board, using QupZilla to configure it.

As I mentioned on the other thread, override the choice to use QEMU by setting the make variable: make QEMU=/usr/bin/env.

There is no detection for Bubblewrap, but I have now added an override, set make variable INSECURE to YES, or for run_RISC_OS set the environment variable RISC_OS__INSECURE to YES.

Thanks Timothy. Not sure how I forgot that.
I revisited a few things quickly last night. With the tablet bwrap passes the tests but fails when invoked normally. So there’s that. I also discovered that it seemed to support three finger tapping for middle click but it doesn’t seem to work through SDL. Probably related to all the other weirdness with drivers that could really be handled at a higher level.

I also tried the Pi zero as a gadget again. Native with Test_Wimp and Qemu with Test_Boot. This was before your reply, Timothy. I just wanted to better understand what I was seeing.

Steve, I just learned what a Wispy is thanks to you. How about that. An OPi Zero is my home server, but I have never used the WiFi on it.
It always ends up with uptimes into the months before I invariably bump the cord while shifting things.

I fully stripped the recently deceased 386 notebook. The connector for the LCD on the main board is a nightmare. I’m not sure it’s worth my time to work it out.

Last night I was doing my usual AliExpress dive to see what new components are being sold. The usual with HDMI LCDs. Some new higher res GPIO LCDs, lots more circular LCDs, and surprisingly a larger, higher res e-paper screen for a “reasonable” price. Getting much closer to LCDs for pixels per unit of currency.

Not finished, but ready to run: https://github.com/TimothyEBaldwin/RO_Linux

Cool. Thanks!

I finally got around to ordering a BadUSB ATMega32U (?) board to make a touchpad interface converter out of. I think I ordered one of the new Arduino Micro Pro (?) knockoffs which also now use the same uC, but a bit cheaper so more friendly for experimenting.

On other fronts I’ve persevered with trying to get the RO Linux build to work on my TF700T running lubuntu Precise. Trying to get a release so old partially upgraded is not something I’d recommend. Currently I’m trying to get SDL2 to work now that the toolchains, and various other libraries have been updated.

I heard back from the Pine people. Apparently I live in a remote area so postage has doubled. So it’s the usual thing of postage costing about as much as the item :(

It may not be relevant, but could I draw your attention to the latest Magpie magazine:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/74/

I don’t believe the concept of off-topic exists here.

Thanks for sharing that. It’s an interesting idea. The whole article was interesting. I didn’t realise that MagPi had an online readable version at all.

I said this in another thread, but I feel that driver module templates would be a beneficial thing. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to drive a GPIO based screen. I know Rick did it with an OLED. I’ve used his code on them too. But to have a GraphicsV template would be amazing. Not for the OLED though. It’d be a way of seeing a small section of the Iconbar I guess.

Even more off topic. A while ago I put together a motherboard, or more a backplane for my Pi Zero. It had an OLED, RTC and DAC on it. Sadly there was no nice way for it to sit. I kind of failed there.

Yesterday I crudely mangled the broken remains of a previous attempt at a case for the old Pi Zero to accept an SPI ethernet module. I also borrowed the DAC from that previously mentioned board. This thing is a rats nest of DuPont wires, and of course the two additions are completely unsupported by RISC OS. But that’s the idea.
I know the ethernet adapter works. I’ve used it with Raspbian previously when I only had a Pi Zero and no USB ethernet or WiFi dongle. The DAC should also work.
I did it so I can poke at the hardware from RO when I feel like it. It gives me a basis for experimenting with driver modules too. It’s the RO interface part where I struggle. So it’s a platform for learning.
I’d be so happy if I could write driver modules. It’d be useful for both the hardware I want to use with my Pi and for some hardware for the Allwinner.

Coming back around, there are some fairly decent GPIO based TFTs out there that would go well with a Pi Notebook.

I’ve been thinking about TFTs, especially after seeing the empty GraphicsV module that Jeffrey provided. HDMI seems by far the easiest and fastest method, plus leaves precious GPIO pins free for other things. However GPIO can allow for things like alternate screen tech, and the use of differently shaped screens not usually sold with an HDMI connector. I mean more like the relatively long screens. Not circular ones.
This line of thought came about thinking that RO is rather nice to use in portrait mode. My current screen for the Pi is almost square so I don’t. But the older, lower res one was more rectangular.

Totally unrelated, but it would seem a good way to torture a Raspberry Pi 3 is to use Tensorflow on it. Temperature and voltage warnings flickering away hahaha.

Last night in a fit of frustration I purchased one of the 5", 800×480 HDMI TFTs. It should be sufficient. It’ll certainly be an odd looking device. Using the TFT in portrait mode still makes the most sense to me. Far less screen will be lost to the Iconbar and it won’t be like peering through a letterbox to edit documents.

I believe I had a notebook that had a little trackball and buttons on one side of the screen. Perhaps a setup like that for the trackpad could work?
I don’t recall ever having used it so it was probably a non-starter in a batch of old untested hardware.