This Toshiba T1000 Sleeper Build Hides a Raspberry Pi, High-Resolution Ultra-Wide Display

Pseudonymous maker "nilseuropa," hereafter simply "Nils," has taken the empty chassis of a classic Toshiba T1000 notebook computer and turned it into a home for a Raspberry Pi single-board computer — complete with ultra-wide high-resolution display.

"[This started] as an empty shell of a [Toshiba] T1000," Nils explains of the NASA-themed portable. "I have a fully-restored T1000 too, I really love the form factor and display. The original screen has some custom Toshiba chips for [which] I was unable to find the datasheet."

"I could poke around with a logic analyzer on a working T1000 to figure out how to drive it," Nils continues, an approach that was eventually discarded in favor of installing a modern display panel. "Initially I was going to hook it up directly to the [Broadcom] BCM's GPIOs [General-Purpose Inputs/Outputs], but it is always better to finish something than half a half ready project lying around in another box."

The Toshiba T1000 launched in 1987 as competition to the IBM PC Convertible, driven by an Intel 8088-compatible processor running at 4.77MHz and with 512kB of RAM expandable to a generous 1.2MB. Nils' sleeper build, though, reuses none of the electronics of the original — replacing them with a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, a considerably more powerful single-board computer capable of going toe-to-toe with a low-end modern desktop computer.

Having opted not to keep the original display, Nils replaced it with an 8.8" ultra-wide full-color panel with capacitive touch capabilities, helping to compensate for the Toshiba's lack of integrated pointing device, connected to the Raspberry Pi over its MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) port. There's a modern mechanical keyboard in place of Toshiba's original, while a 10Ah battery keeps everything ticking over on the go, with as many ports as possible brought out at the rear of the device.

More information on the project is available in Nils' Reddit post.