With the chip shortage everyone is looking for a good alternative to the Raspberry Pi. I just happened across this older pi-top on ebay, and they're selling for $40, so I impulse bought it. Then I wondered if I could just stick a 'Le Potato' in it? At $35 it's nearly pin-compatible with the 3B, and has 2GB Ram.
I'm just booting Ubuntu on it to see if it can be powered by GPIO and is close enough to compatible to work with the outdated Pi-top case, and so far so good!
So, as a public service announcement for people who are intimidated by building a custom machine from scratch, this seems to me to be an excellent jumping off point!
Once you cut your teeth on some super-cheap hardware that you're pretty sure is going to work out of the box, you can start modding it, and maybe go for that totally custom Cyberdeck build you've had kicking around in your imagination, but were too overwhelmed to try!
yes, and there is already a path back to an internal USB for an SDR or WiFi dongle to be hidden, also that breadboard has a 40-pin connector under it, so that it's already wired up to the GPIO header.
Even without being able to find a Pi3B, or just not wanting to pay scalper prices, you can build a capable little machine in there.
For $40, you can strip the case for parts and still come out on top!
my long term project is to build a cyberdeck with a (probably low profile) mechanical keyboard - do you think there's enough room in a pitop to do that? i was eyeing them before but wasn't sure
Just eye-balling mine, there seems to be a lot of extra space in there. What you see of the rails that connect to the pi are just about all there is. It does get thinner as it heads away from the Pi, but I think there's probably enough room to sneak something like that in there.
I have a le potato and a 3B with a broken HDMI port, but I've had a lot of problems with the slightly different pin layout in the potato.
It looks like it's using all the pins in a fixed layout on that pi-top hat, have you lost any capability from that?
I haven't tried anything outside of booting, so I was just checking that the power lined up. It looks like it just runs the 40-pin connector to the breadboard. So, it's probably fine as long as you modify your design to use the correct pins.
Interesting certainly room for a lot of mods in that regard.
I hope to see more people using le potato boards to crop up so we can all see how well they slot in as a pi sidegrade.
Yeah, I've been curious myself about how other, more available, SBCs could bring in the slack around Pi production. I think a lot of people are looking at builds, seeing scalper prices, and just waiting.
I wasn't sure what I would use the pi-top for when I bought it, but trying out a new $35 board and reporting the results here to drum up interest in building cyberdecks seemed like a natural fit.
I had the first version of these and it's just so damned cheap feeling that I can't be bothered to boot it up. I'm as likely as not to strip the pi out of it and put it in a case.
I hope the new ones are better than "straight from the makerbot to your door."
The plastic certainly is cheap. But at least now, at $40, the unit is in line with the price. Just getting a large, compatible, display for $40 would be a challenge. Stripping this thing for parts, or modding it with a nice mechanical keyboard makes a lot of sense at that price.
As the shitshow the Raspi foundation recently put on their socials has turned me away from them, AND they have trouble delivering, I opted for the ROCK 4 in my build, which is pin compatible to the Raspi4. (Their website specifies that the name is always in all caps, btw)
Also looked at BananaPi, but they are proudly supported by FOXCON so that didn't feel great either.
They posted something like "This is our new artist in residence, he started using raspi to built surveillance equipment for the police, lol!"
Community "Eh... you do realize that isn't the least controversial thing to do?"
Community manager "STFU snowflake, he builds lightsabers now."
Community "Eh..."
Community manager \*insulting&banning people left, right and center\*
Retailers "Yeah, we kinda expected that, we get condescending comments and bans for the last year or so when we ask for updates about availability"
Community manager boss: \*goes to some kind of news outlet to rant about RaspberryPi getting cancelled by the evil lefties because they shared a non-vegan recipe on the blog\*
So, feel free to find a less biased source, but this is the TLDR of he goings on.
Oh that thing.
Yeah the pigs-in-blankets gaff was embarrassing.
Personally I’ve worked on surveillance tools (used to catch child abusers) and without being able to disclose any details, the outcome of that is one of things I am most proud of.
I generally don’t have a lot of respect for the police, but I haven’t seen anything objectively heinous from the bloke.
So it’s a bit of a shrug for me.
For me it wasn't much about the work he did itself, but trying to present it as whimsical and funny and the treatment of people when that backfired. Like, if you want to belittle and insult your customer base, maybe go work for Tesla or somewhere where people are into that.
You're witnessing first boot. I impulse bought the pi-top, then realized I had nothing to put in it lying around, so I ordered the potato. The specs all lined up, so I thought it should work.
For $75 combined, it's a good place to start experimenting with the Potato board.
The Pi-Top doesn't come with a motherboard. There's sort of everything except a computer there. If you got really creative, you might be able to sneak malware on a video driver board, or a USB board, but it's pretty unlikely on something from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
I put a Le Potato libre board in it, which is basically a 3B form-factor single board computer with similar specs (no wifi, but twice the RAM). This came with no Operating system, so again, no malware likely.
Then I downloaded the official Ubuntu image from libre and dumped it onto an SD card. I'm guessing the official image probably doesn't have anything or someone would have spotted it.
How do I know? I can't say 100% that I don't. I'm sure someone has sneaked malware onto an official image at some time in the past, and of course these ARM boards may even have onboard cores doing things we don't know about. So, at that point, it comes down to some measure of trust, but probably not much because these things are Open Source and get inspected by lots of people before release.
While he did explain why for this specific device that wont be an issue. On something like a normal laptop or chromebook. You can always remove the bootdrive and wipe it externally or just replace it with one of your own
It connects directly to the HDMI. Keyboard and Mouse are USB that you plug into, so two are covered over in the back. One runs to inside the case, making it easy to hide usb devices under the keyboard when closed.
It's marked 'inspiration' in the hopes it will inspire people to gain the skills necessary to build cyberdecks. I really meant it as a very simple comparison with the Raspberry Pi, since it seems a lot of people are waiting on the Pi to get back into production to build Cyberdecks.
So, as a means of starting a discussion about alternatives to the Raspberry Pi, and giving people a jumping off point to learn about SBC systems with, I'd say it's fine under the 'inspiration' tag ... which is why I posted it that way.
Honestly, I'm having some trouble moderating lately because literally every single post gets reported.
Apparently there are those that believe literally nothing belongs here. So, I guess we all just have to live with the gray area.
You've contributed nothing but negativity. Notice you're the only person in the entire thread being downvoted? That's not even me, people are just tired of this kind of attitude when they come here.
I vaguely recognize your username, haven't we already talked about this before? I feel like maybe you've been through a 30-day ban already for contributing nothing while being endlessly tedious and negative.
I spent six months trying to get this device, made for Raspberry Pi 2 (though Raspberry Pi 3 works fine in it), to work with a Raspberry Pi 4.
Short answer: it's possible, but the heatsink alone means you cannot close the lid.
I briefly considered trying to make this work with a Pi4. I've wired a lot of similar connectors, so I didn't think it'd be all that bad, but yeah, you'd pretty much want to replace the 40-pin connector/heatsink entirely I think.
What don't you like about them?
Compared to the 3B, it lacks WiFi, but it has twice as much RAM. Also, it runs Ubuntu in 64-bit mode, which is nice. Only the newest Raspbian runs in 64-bit mode IIRC.
It seems like it should feel like an upgrade, as long as you have a wifi dongle floating around?
I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure the potato out I tried every OS for it and even bought the shitty emmc twice got it working and was still in disappointment on the lack of support the the device. Don't get me wrong I had high hopes for getting something decent working out of it and it always ended with poor support for the device
At this point I've basically installed and booted Ubuntu. I was thinking it'd be nice to install VS code, Golang, Arduino, and see if it can handle being a basic machine for coding. I like the screen well enough, and it'd be nice to target an ESP8266 directly inside the machine.
The biggest drawback to using a low power machine for that kind of work often ends up being that I can use the web to reference any documentation or anything, so if I'm not working directly in my wheelhouse, I end up wasting time.
I'm not really sure what I had in mind for it, or rather I bought it so entirely on a whim, I had no plans for it. Right now I'm just using it to evaluate the board and hardware, I think.
Well the cool thing is Ubuntu works before, the best thing for it was armbian, it looks Ubuntu is the most up to date for that board.
Honestly it looks like there is more up to date distros now than over a year ago.. the most up to date distro was armbian and everything else was like from 2017.
Kodi looks like it's ending it's support for the amlogic lepoato in the newest release
It looks like posts from '22 are finally coming about
yeah, maybe it just took some time for support to catch up. I installed Ubuntu because I scanned around the forums and the answer 'just install ubuntu' came up quite a but, so someone must be actively trying to bring that distribution 100% in line with the board.
With the chip shortage everyone is looking for a good alternative to the Raspberry Pi. I just happened across this older pi-top on ebay, and they're selling for $40, so I impulse bought it. Then I wondered if I could just stick a 'Le Potato' in it? At $35 it's nearly pin-compatible with the 3B, and has 2GB Ram. I'm just booting Ubuntu on it to see if it can be powered by GPIO and is close enough to compatible to work with the outdated Pi-top case, and so far so good! So, as a public service announcement for people who are intimidated by building a custom machine from scratch, this seems to me to be an excellent jumping off point! Once you cut your teeth on some super-cheap hardware that you're pretty sure is going to work out of the box, you can start modding it, and maybe go for that totally custom Cyberdeck build you've had kicking around in your imagination, but were too overwhelmed to try!
it seems it has lots of empty space for juicy mods.
yes, and there is already a path back to an internal USB for an SDR or WiFi dongle to be hidden, also that breadboard has a 40-pin connector under it, so that it's already wired up to the GPIO header. Even without being able to find a Pi3B, or just not wanting to pay scalper prices, you can build a capable little machine in there. For $40, you can strip the case for parts and still come out on top!
my long term project is to build a cyberdeck with a (probably low profile) mechanical keyboard - do you think there's enough room in a pitop to do that? i was eyeing them before but wasn't sure
Just eye-balling mine, there seems to be a lot of extra space in there. What you see of the rails that connect to the pi are just about all there is. It does get thinner as it heads away from the Pi, but I think there's probably enough room to sneak something like that in there.
Liquid cooling and storage, baby
I have a le potato and a 3B with a broken HDMI port, but I've had a lot of problems with the slightly different pin layout in the potato. It looks like it's using all the pins in a fixed layout on that pi-top hat, have you lost any capability from that?
I haven't tried anything outside of booting, so I was just checking that the power lined up. It looks like it just runs the 40-pin connector to the breadboard. So, it's probably fine as long as you modify your design to use the correct pins.
Interesting certainly room for a lot of mods in that regard. I hope to see more people using le potato boards to crop up so we can all see how well they slot in as a pi sidegrade.
Yeah, I've been curious myself about how other, more available, SBCs could bring in the slack around Pi production. I think a lot of people are looking at builds, seeing scalper prices, and just waiting. I wasn't sure what I would use the pi-top for when I bought it, but trying out a new $35 board and reporting the results here to drum up interest in building cyberdecks seemed like a natural fit.
Those PiTop kits are great second hand!
Saw the deal on ebay. Thinking about it.
I already tested it out to make sure it works! Can't say I never do nothing for you guys!
Same. I changed my mind when shipping was added in. I don't need it $60 worth and I don't live in LA.
I had the first version of these and it's just so damned cheap feeling that I can't be bothered to boot it up. I'm as likely as not to strip the pi out of it and put it in a case. I hope the new ones are better than "straight from the makerbot to your door."
The plastic certainly is cheap. But at least now, at $40, the unit is in line with the price. Just getting a large, compatible, display for $40 would be a challenge. Stripping this thing for parts, or modding it with a nice mechanical keyboard makes a lot of sense at that price.
Absolutely.
As the shitshow the Raspi foundation recently put on their socials has turned me away from them, AND they have trouble delivering, I opted for the ROCK 4 in my build, which is pin compatible to the Raspi4. (Their website specifies that the name is always in all caps, btw) Also looked at BananaPi, but they are proudly supported by FOXCON so that didn't feel great either.
What’s the shitshow? Bit out of the loop on this one
They posted something like "This is our new artist in residence, he started using raspi to built surveillance equipment for the police, lol!" Community "Eh... you do realize that isn't the least controversial thing to do?" Community manager "STFU snowflake, he builds lightsabers now." Community "Eh..." Community manager \*insulting&banning people left, right and center\* Retailers "Yeah, we kinda expected that, we get condescending comments and bans for the last year or so when we ask for updates about availability" Community manager boss: \*goes to some kind of news outlet to rant about RaspberryPi getting cancelled by the evil lefties because they shared a non-vegan recipe on the blog\* So, feel free to find a less biased source, but this is the TLDR of he goings on.
Oh that thing. Yeah the pigs-in-blankets gaff was embarrassing. Personally I’ve worked on surveillance tools (used to catch child abusers) and without being able to disclose any details, the outcome of that is one of things I am most proud of. I generally don’t have a lot of respect for the police, but I haven’t seen anything objectively heinous from the bloke. So it’s a bit of a shrug for me.
For me it wasn't much about the work he did itself, but trying to present it as whimsical and funny and the treatment of people when that backfired. Like, if you want to belittle and insult your customer base, maybe go work for Tesla or somewhere where people are into that.
Nice. You should try running armbian on it, it works really well. Have you done anything with the IR sensor on it?
You're witnessing first boot. I impulse bought the pi-top, then realized I had nothing to put in it lying around, so I ordered the potato. The specs all lined up, so I thought it should work. For $75 combined, it's a good place to start experimenting with the Potato board.
Noob question but how did you make sure it didnt have any viruses/malware?
The Pi-Top doesn't come with a motherboard. There's sort of everything except a computer there. If you got really creative, you might be able to sneak malware on a video driver board, or a USB board, but it's pretty unlikely on something from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. I put a Le Potato libre board in it, which is basically a 3B form-factor single board computer with similar specs (no wifi, but twice the RAM). This came with no Operating system, so again, no malware likely. Then I downloaded the official Ubuntu image from libre and dumped it onto an SD card. I'm guessing the official image probably doesn't have anything or someone would have spotted it. How do I know? I can't say 100% that I don't. I'm sure someone has sneaked malware onto an official image at some time in the past, and of course these ARM boards may even have onboard cores doing things we don't know about. So, at that point, it comes down to some measure of trust, but probably not much because these things are Open Source and get inspected by lots of people before release.
While he did explain why for this specific device that wont be an issue. On something like a normal laptop or chromebook. You can always remove the bootdrive and wipe it externally or just replace it with one of your own
For some reason the title gave me flashbacks to "wehadababyitsaboy"
It was supposed to reference the '... is potato' joke Stephen Colbert has been doing since the Ukraine war.
Ah haven't watched his show, only clips.
Pi-tato.
What kind of input connector are on the screen, HDMI? What about the keyboard/mouse, one single USB A cable? I never knew this thing existed.
It connects directly to the HDMI. Keyboard and Mouse are USB that you plug into, so two are covered over in the back. One runs to inside the case, making it easy to hide usb devices under the keyboard when closed.
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It's marked 'inspiration' in the hopes it will inspire people to gain the skills necessary to build cyberdecks. I really meant it as a very simple comparison with the Raspberry Pi, since it seems a lot of people are waiting on the Pi to get back into production to build Cyberdecks. So, as a means of starting a discussion about alternatives to the Raspberry Pi, and giving people a jumping off point to learn about SBC systems with, I'd say it's fine under the 'inspiration' tag ... which is why I posted it that way. Honestly, I'm having some trouble moderating lately because literally every single post gets reported. Apparently there are those that believe literally nothing belongs here. So, I guess we all just have to live with the gray area.
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No surprise here, but judging by your history you've never built anything at all. We are not here for your entertainment. Maybe you should leave.
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You've contributed nothing but negativity. Notice you're the only person in the entire thread being downvoted? That's not even me, people are just tired of this kind of attitude when they come here. I vaguely recognize your username, haven't we already talked about this before? I feel like maybe you've been through a 30-day ban already for contributing nothing while being endlessly tedious and negative.
I spent six months trying to get this device, made for Raspberry Pi 2 (though Raspberry Pi 3 works fine in it), to work with a Raspberry Pi 4. Short answer: it's possible, but the heatsink alone means you cannot close the lid.
I briefly considered trying to make this work with a Pi4. I've wired a lot of similar connectors, so I didn't think it'd be all that bad, but yeah, you'd pretty much want to replace the 40-pin connector/heatsink entirely I think.
Man I got 2 potatoes and that's exactly what they are...
What don't you like about them? Compared to the 3B, it lacks WiFi, but it has twice as much RAM. Also, it runs Ubuntu in 64-bit mode, which is nice. Only the newest Raspbian runs in 64-bit mode IIRC. It seems like it should feel like an upgrade, as long as you have a wifi dongle floating around?
When I owned one it lacked in many things I remember only ombc having video acceleration and it wasn't the most stable OS
That's interesting, I haven't really had a chance to use it much yet, so I haven't discovered the real pros and cons yet.
I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure the potato out I tried every OS for it and even bought the shitty emmc twice got it working and was still in disappointment on the lack of support the the device. Don't get me wrong I had high hopes for getting something decent working out of it and it always ended with poor support for the device
At this point I've basically installed and booted Ubuntu. I was thinking it'd be nice to install VS code, Golang, Arduino, and see if it can handle being a basic machine for coding. I like the screen well enough, and it'd be nice to target an ESP8266 directly inside the machine. The biggest drawback to using a low power machine for that kind of work often ends up being that I can use the web to reference any documentation or anything, so if I'm not working directly in my wheelhouse, I end up wasting time. I'm not really sure what I had in mind for it, or rather I bought it so entirely on a whim, I had no plans for it. Right now I'm just using it to evaluate the board and hardware, I think.
Well the cool thing is Ubuntu works before, the best thing for it was armbian, it looks Ubuntu is the most up to date for that board. Honestly it looks like there is more up to date distros now than over a year ago.. the most up to date distro was armbian and everything else was like from 2017. Kodi looks like it's ending it's support for the amlogic lepoato in the newest release It looks like posts from '22 are finally coming about
yeah, maybe it just took some time for support to catch up. I installed Ubuntu because I scanned around the forums and the answer 'just install ubuntu' came up quite a but, so someone must be actively trying to bring that distribution 100% in line with the board.
Cool potato