I always wanted to know what kind of pants people wear who say that to this device size (see also Nintendo DS & co)
I picked one up a few months ago and I like it.
The Hackberry looks awesome. I was going to build/buy one, but I wanted a slightly bigger screen and keyboard, and I also wanted to save some money by using an old 3b+ I had laying around. And I wanted to be able to build it quickly from off-the-shelf Amazon components. So all-in I think I spent ~$70 on this one, whereas the hackberry pi would have cost about double that, and then I would have had to buy the CM5 module.
Curious to hear of your experience with the hackberry - I still might consider getting one of those myself.
I don't have a 3D printer, so I bought the kit from Elecrow. I had to buy my own CM5, a 2TB NVMEe SSD, and a suitably sized WiFi antenna (that would fit into the case without modification). I also picked up a $60 portable (1k) HDMI monitor because the 720x720 screen is difficult to use for apps like Firefox and Thunderbird. I use an Apple wireless keyboard and an Acer wireless mouse (both Bluetooth). The keyboard & monitor fit nicely into a plastic A4 document jacket. I was surprised that the Hackberry's USB-A ports provide enough juice to power the monitor. The Hackberry Pi has got a big battery. The one Hackberry Pi design choice that I don't like is the lack of an RJ45 Ethernet port. They could have left off the I2C port and squeezed a PHY in there somehow. (The CM5 has an Ethernet controller.) I've noticed that if I use a USB-A Ethernet dongle, it sometimes hangs under heavy traffic. I've tried dongles with different chipsets and they all seem to have the same issue. The WiFi speeds (as long as you have a good antenna) are great, and are usually faster than a USB Ethernet dongle anyway.
The thing is ideal for travel. It can fit into any hotel room safe, or go with you.
Once upon a time I wrote a small script to turn a raspberry pi into a midi device. I really want to be able to make my own custom midi controller, but it's not exactly fun.
Do you have any way to email or message you.
You might need to design a new back panel for the enclosure.
I built a cyberdeck bigger than this and the case came out to be around 30 euros.
However, I mostly use this unit in terminal, which means I boot to terminal and only occasionally start up the GUI with startx when I need it.
I use terminal because: I'm trying to brush up on my terminal skills and most of my use-cases are covered in terminal with applications. Some of my favorite terminal applications are:
tmux - for managing multiple terminal windows nano - for writing code (occasionally I use vim) tty-clock - nice clock screen saver lynx - text based web browser. works surprisingly well on some sites like wikipedia epy - ebook reader - great for reading classic free ebooks from Project Gutenberg doom - because doom cmatrix - matrix-style screensaver - looks really cool
My main use case is for learning new code languages - it's nice to have a handheld device on me to practice writing code when I have a few minutes on me but don't have a laptop
It would be nice to have the beefier Pi 5 on Bumble Berry for the rare times that I need a GUI. I mostly use terminal on this device so it’s usually not a problem, but when I do have to use the full GUI I find the 3b+ annoyingly slow.
I briefly tested the Bumble Berry battery with a Pi 500 and although I got an error message saying that the power supply is not capable of supplying 5A, it seemed to run just fine. The battery is rated to 3A, and streaming full screen video on a 4K screen seemed to draw only about 1A (measured by a usb-c pass-thru dongle). However, I did not push the Pi 5 to its limits and I haven’t used it for an extended amount of time so I can’t confidently say how well it would work.
If you’re willing to pay the extra cash and want a smaller form factor it sounds like Hackberry is definitely the way to go.