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Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

I always love these cool cyberdeck style builds but whenever the bug to build my own catches me, I end up realizing i'm just trying to build a really bad notebook.

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Yes, these are cool and fun projects, but not something I'd use on a regular basis.

I've bought a few old Chromebooks off of eBay recently (for around $20 USD each), and re-flashed the BIOS so that I could install Debian on them.

The student-oriented Chromebooks are reasonably sturdy, and at that price point, I just don't care if something bad happens to it.

Yeah. This would be great if it could emulate usb storage, do transparent bridging via switch vlans, support serial consoles, etc, but it is just a case, battery, disk, and bad keyboard.

raspberry pi's support USB gadget mode, and can thus emulate USB storage with the right connector.

TTL-level serial port pins exist as well.

This is how the PiKVM works. It pretends to be a hub with an attached mouse/keyboard (and optionally a flash drive/storage)

Then optionally you can connect your motherboards power/reset pins so you can reboot or turn off remotely.

Video is a third party HDMI capture card that plugs into the Pis camera port.

There's nothing particularly stopping you implementing at least most of that in software if you want. Stick a suitably-programmable switch in and you could do the rest too.

Exactly my point - this project seems of limited usefulness because it could have done a lot more but didn’t add much utility that a pi+screen+keyboard doesn’t already have.

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