#Hi all, I am designing a custom
rugged frigate
Tentative BOM:
CORE COMPUTE & AUDIO
- SBC: Raspberry Pi 4
- Audio: Built-in 3.5mm Jack (Pi 4)
- Storage: microSD Card (64GB).
- Input: Arbitrary mechanical keyboard that connects to screen through USB
- Display: 1080p HDMI Touchscreen
RADIO NODE
- Dev Board: Heltec V3 or T-Beam (needs to be mounted internally)
- Connection: Internal USB or UART wiring? Unsure.
- Antenna: Needs an IPX/U.FL to SMA pigtail to route the antenna to the edge of laptop (screen) case, or external mount antenna.
POWER & CHASSIS
- Battery: 2x or 3x 18650 Li-Ion cells in a custom 3D printed tray OR a slim Li-Po pack.
- BMS/Charging: Pi UPS HAT (adds height).
- Enclosure: needed for screen only
- Material: Ideally aluminum (metal additive manufacturing).
- Cooling: Low-profile heatsinks? thin blower fan?
lime furnace
How much battery life are you expecting?
Does RPI support sleep and hibernate now?
It sounds like this isn’t so much a laptop as it is a portable computer
If you actually want a laptop form-factor you might consider the rpi compute module on a custom backplane so you can route the peripherals where you like. But a custom PCB that large would probably ruin the cost efficacy of using off-the-shelf parts
lime furnace
Here’s some discussion on the low-power modes of pi5. It looks like there’s still no suspend or hibernate support. https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/147353/can-i-use-raspberry-pi-5-into-low-power-mode-programmatically
rugged frigate
How much battery life are you expecting?
Does RPI support sleep and hibernate no...
The battery life should at least 2 hrs? What do you mean by distinguishing between a laptop and portable computer? I’m thinking that all laptops are portable computers, but not all portable computers are laptops.
rugged frigate
Here’s some discussion on the low-power modes of pi5. It looks like there’s stil...
Is there a reason I should use Pi 5 instead of Pi 4?
lime furnace
Is there a reason I should use Pi 5 instead of Pi 4?
There could be, but that’s not where I was going. I only meant that laptops normally suspend for power saving when you close the lid, but rpi doesn’t support that. It’s either on or it’s disconnected from power
rugged frigate
There could be, but that’s not where I was going. I only meant that laptops norm...
Oh! Thank you for laying that out so plainly.
lime furnace
I wonder if userspace hibernate works without kernel support?
Ugh. Linux has supported hibernate for over a decade now and I can't find info on the old hacky methods. Maybe the best option is to save your work and make a list of the apps to start up on next boot.
rugged frigate
What keywords should I use to research this myself? I didn’t know this was a potential issue.
lime furnace
From what I can tell, the old ways of "suspend to disk" were buggy and have since been abandoned. But some Desktop Environments have options to open a set of apps on login. Here's an example from KDE:
Not that I'm recommending KDE for rpi. Probably something light like LXDE would be better
Oh look, rpiOS already uses LXDE with Openbox. That's good then
So anyway, shutdown and startup behavior is something to try out before you build the enclosure and everything
See if you like the experience™
We don't want to see people shut the lid, enjoy their lunch, and then come back to find the battery dead and they've lost all their work