Portable Pi 84 Is a Unique DIY Laptop You Can 3D Print Today
If you’ve ever wanted to build your own Raspberry Pi laptop, then Michael Mayer’s Portable Pi 84 may be the design you’ve been waiting for.
Until pretty recently, the concept of a DIY laptop was largely a pipe dream for the geeks of the world. Modular laptop components simply didn’t exist in the way that desktop components did. But the possibilities changed when relatively powerful single-board computers, like Raspberry Pis, came along. Those are compact enough to fit into a laptop-size device and include almost everything a laptop needs. If you want to live the DIY laptop dream, Michael Mayer’s Portable Pi 84 will help you with everything else.
A single-board computer, like the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B used for this project, is roughly equivalent to all of the components you’d find in a desktop computer case. It doesn’t include the monitor, keyboard, mouse, or power supply. The Portable Pi 84 is a design that provides those (and more), giving you a complete and functional laptop.
The Portable Pi 84 takes obvious inspiration from the early laptop designs of the ‘80s, as the chunky enclosure would likely make today’s laptop manufacturers faint. It isn’t sleek and wouldn’t appeal to the general consumer market, but it is attractive to those of us in the target demographic. It has a mechanical keyboard with an ortholinear layout and full-size keys, and a unique ultra-wide LCD screen. That is a 9.3” Waveshare touchscreen with a resolution of 1600×600.
The enclosure, which Mayer designed in FreeCAD, is 3D-printable and makes heavy use of heat-set inserts for sturdy construction. The keyboard is a 40% design and uses a Raspberry Pi Pico development board running KMK firmware. There isn’t enough room for that on the main keyboard PCB, so Mayer provides instructions on how to move it and run wires to the keyboard matrix pins.
Power comes from a pair of 18650 lithium batteries, each with a capacity of 5,000mAh, through a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) HAT. There is also a simple LED battery level indicator and buttons to control power. Sound pumps out through a pair of small speakers or the 3.5mm headphone jack.
A DIY laptop like this would have been almost impossible to build 20 years ago. Now, anyone with a 3D printer and some experience with a soldering iron can build the Portable Pi 84.