Hands on with the pi-top

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In the do-it-yourself community that has grown up around the Raspberry Pi, the pi-top has been generating buzz for over a year. As the name implies, it's a laptop that runs using a Raspberry Pi. In addition, it is modular, consists of free hardware and software (except for firmware on the Pi's GPU) and ships in a kit for users to assemble—all of which amply justifies the buzz. Moreover, when the pi-top finally shipped last month, it proved to be not just the promised portable and wireless controller for Maker projects, but a low-end laptop suitable for web browsing, email, and light productivity tools. Although minor improvements are needed, the only major feature that pi-top has yet to deliver is the educational software originally promised.

Pi-top was founded as a for-profit company by Jesse Lozano, a self-taught developer, and Ryan Dunwoody, an Oxford engineering graduate. Both had experimented with the Raspberry Pi and Lozano recalls that, when the two met in 2014:

Almost the first thing we discussed was our own Raspberry Pi Projects. We both thought it was limited by being reliant on an HDMI screen and being inherently non-mobile. Ryan mentioned he was working on how to make the Pi mobile, and we both thought we should make a Raspberry Pi laptop.

The company originally intended to start shipping in May 2015. But, like many first-time manufacturers, Lozano and Dunwoody found the process more difficult than they had expected. In the end, the simplest course was for Dunwoody to move to China for five months to oversee the process. By the time pi-top began shipping in early November, the company had several thousand pre-orders to fill.

What they are now shipping is a laptop with a 13.3 inch screen with 1366x768 resolution. A strip above the keyboard slides back to reveal the interior. Inside are cables and two printed circuit boards, a model B+ Raspberry Pi with one gigabyte of RAM and the Hub, which includes the battery and video connections. Both boards screw into place along two tracks on the bottom of the case. In theory, both boards can be replaced as needed, although, considering that the Hub is configured for use with a Raspberry Pi, some hacking might be needed to replace it with another single-board computer. The snap-together case is available in green and black, and its parts can be produced on a 3D printer. Battery life is advertised to be ten hours.

At the same time, pi-top has begun a fundraising campaign for its next product, the pi-topCEED, a pre-assembled $99 desktop computer intended for education. At the time of this writing, the campaign has more than tripled its goal of $50,000 and has over 1800 backers. While these numbers are tiny compared to the shipments of major computer manufacturers, pi-top appears to have gone from a start-up to a modestly successful small business in less than a year.

Assembling and accessorizing

The pi-top arrives in a box barely larger than the laptop itself, with the parts stacked in foam packing. It is accompanied by a manual that consists mostly of illustrations, all of them barely larger than the credit-card-sized circuit boards themselves. For this reason, the manual is best viewed online, where a few zooms can make the details clearer.

Anyone with hardware experience can probably assemble a pi-top in a hour or two. By contrast, the chances for rookie mistakes are numerous. Those can include everything from mistaking the screws in the kit for the spacers that position the circuit boards on the track to not realizing that what appears to be a full-sized SD card is actually a painted sheath from which to pull the actual micro SD card. Consequently, beginners might spend as long as four or five hours—longer if they drop the 2.5mm screws or nuts and have to scour local computer shops for replacements.

When assembly is complete, users need to insert the power cord so that the battery can charge. If the power button fails to light up within a couple of minutes, the most likely problem is a loose cable. Another possibility is that the Hub is not properly connected to the battery, and needs to be unscrewed and repositioned.

The pi-top runs Raspbian, the Debian-based distribution that has become a Raspberry Pi standard. Logging in offers a choice of a registered login, which is needed for upgrades from the company, or a guest account, which can only run applications. Given that the system is configured for sudo, and that both registered and guest accounts share the same customization, the reason for this login distinction seems obscure. Possibly the fact that a registered account is supposed to be able to login to any pi-top is intended as an aid in teaching labs, although as a feature it raises self-evident security issues. However, re-configuring sudo or replacing it with a regular root account should prevent such intrusions.

Either choice of account brings up pi-topOS, which is a shell for Raspbian with icons that link to four applications plus one for the LXDE desktop, and a configuration menu in the lower right corner. Pi-topOS seems targeted at younger users. The default links can bring up the command-line interpreters for Python and the Pi-targeted language Wolfram, as well as CEED Universe [YouTube], which is a gamefied approach to learning basic programming concepts, all of which reflect the original assumption that the pi-top would be used for do-it yourself projects and education. Only a link to a version of Minecraft suggests other uses.

From pi-topOS, users click into LXDE, where the default software is also sparse. However, those who wish to run the pi-top as a regular laptop can find most of the same applications in the Raspbian repositories that are available in any other Linux distribution, and can run apt-get to provide themselves with web and email applications, as well as LibreOffice 3.5—a somewhat antiquated but adequate version. Another option is to install from the limited selection at the Pi Store.

Running the pi-top as a standard laptop also requires additional hardware. The Raspberry Pi itself has only 8 gigabytes of storage, so anyone who wants a fully outfitted laptop may want to buy a micro SD card with more memory and install Raspbian and pi-topOS on it. Users may also want to add a flash drive or portable hard drive for additional storage.

A bigger problem, though, is that the keyboard connector and wireless dongle occupy two of the four USB ports on the Pi, so a USB hub is a sensible investment. Since the touchpad is to the right of the keyboard, left-handed people might want to add a mouse.

In addition, the pi-top has neither audio nor speakers. Audio could be added by attaching a speaker to the Raspberry Pi's built-in audio output, but sound has always been mediocre on the Pi—and besides, the pi-top is laid out so that extra cables are difficult to position. For this reason, an external sound card and speaker is probably the best choice for both convenience and sound quality.

The need for these extras seems another indicator that the educational goals were partly put aside due to the difficulties during production. Or perhaps another perspective is that, in a do-it-yourself laptop, users are expected to be resourceful when they customize. However, pi-top is aware of the need for sound, and announced a $15 speaker add-on as a stretch goal for the forthcoming pi-topCEED, which should work on the pi-top as well.

Educational goals

Like Raspberry Pi itself, pi-top has always intended its products to be educational. However, its first product shows only the first signs of this goal in a few default applications that are mostly undocumented.

Admittedly, assembling a pi-top is an education itself. Yet pi-tops are more simply laid out than a standard laptop or workstation, and the instructions fail to include very much that explains what most of the interior cables actually do. Instead, users are left blindly following instructions with minimal sense of what they are doing. Labeled cables and a handful of well-placed sentences in the instruction manual would go a long way to improve the educational experience of assembly.

To be fair, in the second crowdfunding campaign, education seems much more of a focus than in the first. Not only do donors have the option of donating a pi-topCEED for education, but the intent seems to be to provide more applications and tutorials for every level from basic electronics to programming languages; the first week's donors will be receiving a free breadboard and basic tools. If this material is delivered, then reviews of the pi-topCEED may be at least as much about the software as the hardware. But, for now, education is more of a promise than a realized goal.

Where the value lies

At $299, the pi-top cannot match the prices of Chromebooks and entry level laptops that are in the same device class. The pi-top suffers, too, from the need to add hardware, and the mostly undelivered educational tools. The impression is that the manufacturing process distracted pi-top, and that the company intends to regain its focus with its second product.

Rather, the appeal of the pi-top is in its ethos. Not only is it as free-licensed as any commercial computer is likely to be, but the idea of a laptop as customizable as a workstation scarcely exists outside of a few poorly-distributed kits.

In the do-it-yourself subculture around the Raspberry Pi, the pi-top offers a more portable controller than anything that currently exists. However, the greatest appeal of the pi-top lies its demystification of hardware and its encouragement of the view that a computer's interior is accessible and adjustable, rather than a black box. Although the assembly can be frustrating to those without hardware experience, the sense of accomplishment the first time the pi-top boots successfully is all the greater for the delays involved.

My own satisfaction in the process can best be summarized by this: although I was as clueless during assembly as anyone could be, the day after I got my pi-top up and running, I pre-ordered a pi-topCEED without any hesitation so I could learn more about computers at the circuit-board level. Frankly, I'm hooked—and judging from the fact that the pi-topCEED campaign reached its goal in two days, so, I suspect, are hundreds of others.