This Fully-3D-Printed Laptop Lets You Take Your Raspberry Pi 5 Wherever You Go
With up to three hours of active usage from a quartet of 18650 cells, this compact 10.1" laptop design uses affordable off-the-shelf parts.
Pseudonymous maker "el_cuadillo" has designed a portable clamshell-style laptop featuring a 3D-printed case and a Raspberry Pi 5 — delivering a two- to three-hour runtime from a single charge of its four 18650 lithium-ion cells.
"Wanted to see if I could build a somewhat fully functional battery-powered laptop from a Raspberry Pi 5, with a fully 3D-printed case," el_cuadillo explains of the project. "Designed the case in OnShape and printed on Bambu A1 using Sunlu PLA+ for the body and Giantarm dual color PLA Silk for the accents."
The 3D-printed shell plays host to a 10.1" LCD touchscreen display in the top, hiding the main hardware: a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer with the official Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler heatsink and fan assembly and a Geekworm UPS shield, which powers everything from a quartet of 18650 lithium-ion cells. As an added bonus, the case includes storage for a gamepad and wireless mouse, above the wireless keyboard in its bottom half.
"The Geekworm UPS/battery packs/on-off switch did a lot of heavy lifting and give a battery life of 2-3 hours as well as allowing the [Raspberry] Pi to be turned on without adding power or having to access the Pi's power switch inside the case," the maker explains. "The Python scripts for monitoring battery life/charging status that come with the UPS are great as well."
Elsewhere in the build is a four-port USB hub, the aforementioned Nintendo SNES-style style gamepad, and a robust push-button switch — used to trigger the aforementioned Python scripts that allow the Raspberry Pi to safely shut down on-demand. "Raspberry Pi OS seems an overall superior experience in terms of software compatibility but just prefer the more modern look of [Canonical] Ubuntu [Linux]," el_cuadillo says of the software. "The touchscreen has some quirks but overall is fully functional for navigating the OS and most of software."
More details are available in el_cuadillo's Reddit post; the maker has shown willingness to share STL files for others to repeat the build, though at the time of writing the provided download link was reporting a file-not-found error.