Let’s Get Started: The Raspberry Pi Laptop

The Raspberry Pi single board computer is pretty fricking cool. It can do most things that a full-sized desktop PC can do, and it’s small enough to fit in your wallet.

Smart people across the world have been leveraging its tiny size, low cost, and minimal power draw to create projects which give them greater control of their own hardware, and the kudos of having built it themselves.

In a previous article, we showed you our fabulous Raspberry Pi-based DIY Cloud, and now we’re going to show you how to make your Raspberry Pi properly portable, so that you can take it out on public transport and abuse the free WiFi by hacking everything in sight. If that kind of thing appeals to you.

We appreciate that not everyone in the world is an electronic engineer, and to most people, a breadboard is where the Hovis lives, so we’re going to keep things simple. No soldering required and no exotic components. We’ll be using super-cheap and readily available materials to transform our spanking new Raspberry Pi 4 into a laptop, and we’re going to do it for £20.

As always, this is a guide – not a tutorial, and in following it, you are following our winding trail of thought and research as we attempt to create the Ultimate Super-Simple Dirt-Cheap DIY Portable Raspberry Pi Laptop.

We’ll keep working on the title.