Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

The concept is super cool (although hardly original) but I have an Idea of what to add: make a dockable display with built-id battery (to power itself and the Pi) so people would be able to carry it around and use their PIs anywhere like laptops.

And, by the way, I can see no reason to use micro HDMI in this version - there's a lot of spare space, why not put full-size HDMI ports? Given so much unused space I personally would even add a USB hub.

View on HN

> I can see no reason to use micro HDMI in this version - there's a lot of spare space, why not put full-size HDMI ports?

So to be clear: you are rejecting the board designer's assessment that this was not possible without sacrificing something else?

Yes.

From the article: "It would have been lovely to have had full-size HDMI connectors, but in order to achieve this we would have to remove other functions, or make a bulkier unit."

That explanation sounds like BS. Full size HDMI is still shorter than the ethernet jack, so vertical space is there. Width would be the only restriction, but there's plenty of that, too.

As an aside to this- they'd already built an ecosystem around micro HDMI with the Pi 4 so changing it to full-sized HDMI would probably have irritated just as many people as not. They're also more economical to run through a pick-and-place machine, I believe.

Additionally, a little tidbit not included in this article:

"Also, full-sized HDMI connectors have no lead-in (to funnel the connector in). Whereas the micro-HDMI ones do, this makes auto-insertion of the connectors possible when testing which means we can do testing through the connector. This makes it cheaper and more reliable..."

Source: https://twitter.com/gsholling/status/1323322997315411971?s=2...

> Also, full-sized HDMI connectors have no lead-in (to funnel the connector in). Whereas the micro-HDMI ones do,

That's an interesting point I didn't know. Thanks.

Every penny of cost had to be an issue. The RJ-45 jack doesn't have link/activity LEDs.

Ok. Make a bulkier unit.

It's fairly likely that third parties will make some kind of somewhat-dockable display+battery. The choice of micro HDMI likely will help with some designs of that kind of accessory, given how large the strain reliefs of full-size HDMI cables tend to be. Although I agree with you that for most uses providing at least one full-size HDMI port would have been ideal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com