An Old, Broken Laptop Becomes a Beautiful Raspberry Pi Desktop Computer

Consumer electronics lose their value very quickly, with depreciation curves that rival those of luxury cars. Your $600 laptop is going to be bordering on worthless within five years, which means many of us end up with old laptops that aren’t worth selling — but which we can’t stomach just giving away for recycling. Fortunately, while your old laptop may not have any value to other people, it does contain a number of components that you can use in your projects. That’s how Neil Shepherd obtained the 17” LCD panel that he used to build the fantastic Raspberry Pine desktop computer.

As you’d expect from the pun of a name, this Raspberry Pine computer contains a Raspberry Pi. Specifically, Shepherd used a Pi 3 Model B+, but he may upgrade that to the Pi 4 once it is updated to allow booting from USB. The frame of the computer is, of course, made from pine wood that Shepherd cut and assembled himself. The design is what I’d call “traditional” and would look at home in an old fashioned study. It certainly has more charm than hundreds of indistinguishable generic LCD models that are currently on the market.

The LCD panel is paired with a driver board that can accept input via HDMI, DVI, or VGA. In this case, it’s connected to the Raspberry Pi via HDMI. Power is coming from the laptop’s original power brick, which puts out 19.5 V at 4.5 A. Two DFRobot PSU boards are used to drop that down to the 5 V required for the Raspberry Pi and the 12 V required for the LCD panel and driver board. It can also be powered from a trio of li-ion battery cells through a BMS (Battery Management System) board. All of those components are attached to an acrylic panel that is mounted on the back of the pine wood frame. Shepherd is also working on a matching keyboard, which will connect the original laptop keyboard to the Raspberry Pi through an Arduino Due.