Mobile Raspberry Pi Computer: Build Your Own Pi-to-Go 97
An anonymous reader writes "Everyone has seen Raspberry Pi Computer, the credit card sized mini PC circuit board that costs only $35. Now there is a new Mobile Raspberry Pi called Pi-to-Go, with a mini LCD, 10-hour battery, and 64GB SSD, all packed together in a 3D printed case. See if you are up to the task to build your own."
Re:Nice hobby project (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of spending $391 to make a kludge of shit, you could spend half that and get a netbook.
I've tried to understand why people want a Raspberry Pi, but I just still don't get it, I guess.
Re:Nice hobby project (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you folks doing at the "news for nerds" page anyway?
Re:Nice hobby project (Score:4, Insightful)
Rasberry Pi has its uses but what this guy did is make an oversized underpowered portable computer when you could buy a good android phone (no contract) with better specs for half the cost.
Re:Nice hobby project (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice hobby project (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus, I'm old but not THAT old... I remember when you could buy a stereo kit and assemble it yourself. Sure, you could just go out and buy an assembled stereo - but what fun was that? How would you learn how a stereo works by buying one from a shelf? What is more interesting to other people: an off-the-shelf stereo, or something you assembled yourself? One thing makes you more interesting and less ignorant. The other just makes you a regular consumer.
This seems to be in the same vein, only he actually designed parts of his own kit so it's actually cooler.
Slashvertisements? (Score:4, Insightful)
With the frequency of RPi "articles" on /. one might wonder if there is some payola behind the positive press.
But not a word is spoken about the ongoing supply chain issues, and resellers making candid statements about it not being worthwhile to try to carry them. Can we have a moratorium on articles that drive up RPi demand until the Foundation can get its supply caught up more with the demand you've already created?
Re:Batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
The author could have done some research on battery packs instead of hacking up a laptop pack as he did. There is a company called batteryspace.com that sells multi-cell Li-ion packs with a protection circuit built in. They're not cheap, but they are reasonably safe.
As with anything, the person in question could have done many things differently. So what? The fact stands that this person actually did *something*, which is infinitely better than doing nothing other than telling him why he supposedly did something wrong.
I'll take one not-quite-perfect nerd project like this that actually gets created over a million permutations that *might* be slightly better in one way or another but don't actually exist.
Not Just The Men - (Score:2, Insightful)
Consumer culture is poisonous to both genders. I'm glad to have lived in a family that still embraces concepts like independence and creativity - I knew my great grandparents, if briefly, and learned more about them over time. I learned about the habits they picked up from surviving the Great Depression in particular, about thriftiness and resourcefulness. (Unfortunately I think this is also where my family acquired its hoarding gene.) Women used to take pride in crafts and creating their own clothing in the same way men took pride in trades like woodworking or machining. The demise of the trades made these skills unprofitable to obtain, and the rise of mass production made them unnecessary. The subsequent loss of interest just seems natural in the course of things, but the casual acceptance of mediocrity, homogeneity, and quiet dissatisfaction with everything attacks our nature. We have everything but we feel as though we have nothing, that we lose more every day. I see it all around me, constantly.
It isn't that we're becoming feminized or that we're losing our collective testosterone, but something bigger than that. We're losing our independence, our free will, even our desire to survive: basic underpinnings of sapience. You know, our humanity.
At least there's an upside to all this automation: Robots are becoming so cheap and easy to use that almost any poor idiot with a rainy day fund can eventually get his hands on a CNC table, and eventually, a 3D printer. It's no substitute for real creativity or real skill, but tools are tools - they exist to expedite the creative process. I don't worry about those. What I worry about is the rise of the kind of people who have no want or use for them.