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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Which Raspberry Pi would one need to run Vim and Firefox? And is it possible to have it use a tablet as a monitor and draw power from it?

That would be everything I need to develop web applications. I wonder if I could use a 3-piece setup to do so:

    A keyboard connected to the Pi
    The Pi connected to a tablet which acts as a monitor

Not sure how much the Pi weights, probably less than 100g? The Apple Magic Keyboard for example is 230g. And the Lenovo Tab P12 for example is 570g. So together less than 1kg. For a Linux development machine with external keyboard, that would be quite nice.

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This is... not going to run Firefox. The Pico is a microcontroller with 520KB of RAM.

what can I build with this? 0 experience in embedded dev. I'd like to make something like the Game & Watch, or a toy synth.

You're looking for a full size Raspberry Pi, then.[1]

[1]: https://chicagodist.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-1gb

Do yourself a favor and do not use a Pi for web development, it's way too slow for that. I knew that the Pi was slow when I got myself one (Pi 400) but I didn't think it would be THAT slow. Returned it the next day, barely usable. Better to only use a Pi for non-graphical stuff.

Yeah, browsing is quite painful. I agree.

PI is in an interesting spot. For those who want cheap compute, a low end mini PC can deliver 5x the performance for 1.5x the price with more peripherals available while remaining portable. So it really only makes sense if you care about the form factor, power consumption or GPIO.

I use my PIs for basically two reasons - they can be conveniently powered from a USB hub and they can act as USB gadgets.

Any of the non-Pico Pis could do that although the highest performance would be one of the new Raspberry Pi 5 8GBs. The Pico series are not suitable for desktop computing

My dream is to have a device about the form factor of a Flipper Zero (with the same buttons) that I can then plug into a e-ink monitor and mechanical keyboard to turn it into a text editor.

I have built a few prototypes with Raspberry Pi Zeros, which are luxurious web servers -- 512mb of ram, capable of utilizing a 2tb sd card.

If you skip the plugable and mechanical keyboard parts you're basically describing a cyberdeck.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/

https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/1eksn4a/3d_print...

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