Do you remember the Motorola Lapdock 100? It was a CPU-less laptop designed for plugging in your smartphone that enabled you to use your phone as a computer! Perhaps a bit ahead of its time, they never really caught on — but now you can buy them pretty cheap, and with the release of the Raspberry Pi Zero, it was only a matter of time before someone combined the two.

The Lapdock 100 has long been a useful accessory for the Raspberry Pi, but until the Zero came out, it was always a messy bundle of wires running to and from the devices, making it a less than ideal solution. The Zero changes everything. [Ax0n] knew he had to try combining the two.

Going into the project, he assumed he’d have to do a lot of soldering. He figured he’d have to remove all the GPIO headers, the USB jacks, and the network connector to make it thin enough to actually fit inside the Lapdock. Turns out — he was pleasantly surprised.

By cutting away some of the plastic support structure inside of the Lapdock, he was actually able to fit the Zero in without any desoldering. The most challenging part was keeping it stock — just running the pigtail connectors out of the Lapdock to plug back into the lapdock.