Retro Compaq LTE Laptop Powered by Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Retro Compaq LTE Laptop Powered by Raspberry Pi

dmitrybrant.com

196 pointsdmitrybrant38 comments

I love this, but it's too bad he wasn't able to find a way to preserve the original edge-lit passive matrix display. There's a growing niche of people interested in RLCD displays as a kind of e-ink alternative, and the display this machine originally had was similar to that.

Yep. It was sort of a dealbreaker for me as soon as I read that. Someone put a raspberry pi and modern day display into the case of a 1989 Compaq. Cool project. But not particularly noteworthy.

He said a lot of it was broken. Perhaps that included the original screen too and he had no choice.

That keyboard actually looks really nice to type on compared to modern laptop keyboards

That was my first thought as well.

There's significant advantages to having a 3" thick laptop, in particular is you get 1mm (or more) of key travel; modern Thinkpads have 0.7mm travel due to their slim design. The other is air flow, you can push a substantial amount of cooling air through the case for the same amount fan noise.

I have this fantasy of making a sleeper laptop with a whole bunch of Raspberry Pi’s and having a dedicated Raspberry Pi that operates as a KVM so you could have complete hardware isolation in a laptop.

A sleeper with Pis? Any actual laptop will kick the shit out of as many Pis as you can fit in there.

The sleeper aspect is the hardware isolation.

What the hardware isolation is good for? Beats me

Security ?

If you have the laptop, you have the laptop. Breaking it into pieces doesn't add any security. If you don't have the laptop and are attacking remotely, it's no different than if it weren't physically segregated, whatever the hell the point of that is.

The Pi's MicroSD card is accessible through the floppy drive opening (using tweezers). That in itself is pretty awesome.

Hah, it would be great to set the pi back a bit and cut the top off an old floppy disk to turn it into a caddy that seats with the card and pushes it back into the pi. When in use it would look like a disk is loaded. Perhaps you could even salvage enough of the disk and ejection mechanism to make it pop out with a button press too.

Or bought a USB driven floppy disk drive and fitted that instead. They are cheap - I bought one the other day to recover some data (although I haven’t tried it yet).

Looks like the guy who devised the keyboard mapping also did something similar with an old VAIO:

https://github.com/thedalles77/Pi_Teensy_Laptop/blob/master/...

With the RPi availability situation, it's probably easier to find the retro laptop than the Pi!

Maybe Pro Tip: Amazon stocks a lot of Raspberry Pi “kits” that are a PI and some (usually junk) peripherals. Often these kits are cheaper than the price of the Pi alone on eBay.

One thing I've not seen mentioned, is these smaller laptops are ideal for working on in confined spaces like cattle class seats on aeroplanes if one hasnt already made it and has their own private jet. ;-)

I was looking for comments about airports, yours is the closest: taking this through airport security could result in several very alarmed guards and a very delayed and inconvenienced you.

I wonder if the "what the hell is this guy doing with an ancient laptop" would cause even more jumping to a conclusion like "It must be a bomb!".

Seems like in some places, even though the thing they're alarmed about is harmless, you might get refused boarding or arrested anyway.

An old laptop by itself wouldn't be that alarming but all the messy wiring inside which they'll see when they X-ray it probably would raise some eyebrows yeah :)

Until someone pulls out their mobile and shows off the raspberypi webpage which explains the device and then the blog page explaining how to save old laptops from landfill with a raspberrypi.

However if TSA, or whatever the over exuberant baggage detectives are called, accept the above as an explanation, does one think it might then be possible to create fake webpages which could be shown on a mobile phone that actually disguises the use of a bomb, in effect being duped by fake websites, or does the TSA have a procedure where they have to use their own devices to verify webpages like blogs explaining such a device?

Interesting thought.

I’ve got an old Newton eMate that I keep thinking would make an excellent raspberry pi casemod.

Space for a decent 7” touch screen and plenty of batteries, friendly handle for portability and looks like something from a Cronenberg film.

The only thing that’s stopping me is that it feels wrong to break a perfectly functional device. (If anyone’s got any broken eMates knocking around I’d be very interested)

Gorgeous! My mom had one of these that I would play Crystal Caves on for hours. Any room left in the case for a battery pack?

How do you tackle the lack of a mouse, trackpad, trackpoint or equivalent?

Wireless USB mouse attached via dongle. Or bluetooth mouse.

If Wifi will go through the Compaq shell, so will mouse signals.

I wouldn't game with it, but keynav (https://www.semicomplete.com/projects/keynav/ / https://github.com/jordansissel/keynav) is pretty great.

I had a Compaq similar to this and it had a trackball that would clip onto the right side. I would love to see something like that hooked up to GPIO.

Very neat project.

There's a USB port on the side of the case.

I really hoped he had put an LTE version of a Raspberry PI, to really let the Compaq live up to it's name.

This is awesome. I'm hopeful I can do a project like this someday with a Palm Vx!

This is AWESOME! Nice way to keep a classic alive. I'm with you, DOS games are kinda my thing.

My dream is to one day see something similar, but with the compute module entirely packaged in the UltraBay form factor, and only software modifications on the host device.

Great move, you got a wonderful keyboard and help protect our environment my using the laptop longer instead of putting it to electronic waste.

That thing looks like it has a damn nice keyboard!

Hmmm... it is lacking batteries, right?

Looks like there's enough room to put in a portable USB battery pack.

Not so much a retro laptop "powered" by a Raspberry Pi. More like the shell of an old laptop with a Raspberry Pi stuffed inside. So it's not really a Compaq laptop anymore, just a portable Pi.

What did you think "retro laptop powered by a Raspberry Pi" meant?

Some retro machines have Raspberry Pi boards as co-processors and accelerators.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com