I got the Hackberry Pi Zero from Elecrow recently and it has been excellent for playing around. I really miss real keyboards on mobile devices and it has been fulfilling to use it.
Fwiw, for other projects you can look at other SoC brands than Raspberry, such as OrangePi, BananaPi, ClockworkPi, KickPi, Pine64, Rock64, Odroid, Libre Computer, Radxa, ArmSom, Onion, Udoo, NVIDIA Jetson, ASUS Tinker, Khadas. I was kinda blown away by how many there are. Ask ChatGPT for specific models and feature comparison.
An interesting alternative to the SQFMI Beepy / Beepberry [0][1] which is just a rpi zero but has a Sharp Memory Pixel display that I love. Both could use some work on adapting the UI to the little blackberry touchpad. Neither using a mouse cursor nor meta/ctrl modifier combos are very ergonomic on these little handhelds.
The waiting time is horrendous though. Mine arrived 8 months after I purchased it but beyond that, those are absolutely great. I stopped carrying a laptop in my backpack, just one of those with an additional expansion board and an HDMI port. My work involves a ton of data which I can't fit into memory so in all cases, my computer is just a terminal to a large server somewhere. So Clockwork ticks all the boxes for me. The one thing I wish they had thought about is an easy access to the CM and be able to swap them for different use cases: when I want to preserve battery and speed is not a big deal - cm5. When I want some additional power - pull out the cm4 and toss in a 5 instead.
I recently sourced two Q20 keyboards (which wasn't easy) but you need quite tiny connectors to use it. There's a breakout you can build, if anyone is interested: https://oshwlab.com/amarullz/bbq20breakout
Iirc, CM5 cannot really deep sleep like phones or tablets do (at milli watts). Meaning you can't really use it for anything really portable - and that's a huge problem. I think RK3588 does, and it's a big win.
Edit: Sorry I meant deep sleep, not idle. Corrected.
This sounds like another device that will end up in a drawer, as an experiment it looks good but not sure what you are going to do on a 4" inch display that cannot idle at low milliwatts
I love custom handheld computer projects like this.
Few years ago I wanted to build one as a hobby/toy project with parts that are more or less easily available. So I did [0]. Instead of using a pre-made keyboard I used simple push buttons and instead of specialized keyboard controller I used an Atmega328P. Most of the components are through-hole and easy to solder. Anyway, the couple of the handhelds I built are sitting in a drawer at home, but it was fun building it nevertheless.
I'd rather have it in tablet format with more screen instead of the blackberry keyboard, now that there are very light cheap bluetooth keyboards that are comfortable to type on. I'm using one right now with my phone, and it weighs about the same as the phone. There are smaller and lighter ones around too.
It's much better for extended typing than a screen keyboard or blackberry keyboard. For non-extended typing, the blackberry keyboard is a small enough improvement on the screen keyboard to not be worth permanently dedicating space to it.
Just make the tablet battery swappable and sign me up :).
The Raspberry Pi is in dire need of a DP Alt mode USB C port. Those small portable devices would pair nicely with the current wave of Display/XR glasses but they all need Displayport via USB.
And while you can work around that with an adapter it takes away from the simplicity of just plugging in the glasses ( and most of them get quite hot too).
Do recent SoC integrate necessary muxers? Last I checked few years ago, it needed a special multiplexer chip between display out and USB-C port to handle mode switching, and there were lots of engineering challenges and costs involved, almost like using one set of pipes for both coolant water and lubricant oil.
Something to hack, but I don't see how to easily type braces and parentheses. Looks like a non-starter to me because for me, I hack by writing in languages that require parentheses.
I have both the ble keyboard and the hackberry; they are very nice devices. I use the keyboard for working with xreal glasses on. I type fairly fast now on it. The hackberry is good for tinkering in silence without internet connection; I go sit in the forest and read or, with the hackberry, write small games for fun.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] threadI like it.
Can you move smoothly at all angles with it, well enough to use the desktop GUI?
This is cursed
[0] https://beepy.sqfmi.com/
[1] https://blog.beeper.com/2023/05/16/beeper-x-sqmfi-beepberry/
Some with Lora.
https://lilygo.cc/collections/lora-or-gps
Edit: Sorry I meant deep sleep, not idle. Corrected.
Besides brand awareness what could justify foregoing mainline Linux kernel and superior performance
RK3688 looks incredible based on leaks and could make the CM5 form factor practical instead of the novelty it is now
Few years ago I wanted to build one as a hobby/toy project with parts that are more or less easily available. So I did [0]. Instead of using a pre-made keyboard I used simple push buttons and instead of specialized keyboard controller I used an Atmega328P. Most of the components are through-hole and easy to solder. Anyway, the couple of the handhelds I built are sitting in a drawer at home, but it was fun building it nevertheless.
[0] https://github.com/jovan3/rpi-ibex-hyperpixel
It's much better for extended typing than a screen keyboard or blackberry keyboard. For non-extended typing, the blackberry keyboard is a small enough improvement on the screen keyboard to not be worth permanently dedicating space to it.
Just make the tablet battery swappable and sign me up :).
And while you can work around that with an adapter it takes away from the simplicity of just plugging in the glasses ( and most of them get quite hot too).