Father, Husband, Programmer, Maker, Camper, General Hobbyist Extraordinaire
Some time after the first iteration of the Raspberry Pi Laptop, the Raspberry Pi Foundation suddenly released the Raspberry Pi 2, a backwards compatible quad-core upgrade to the original Raspberry Pi. I knew, just by the specs alone, I had to get one and use it as part of my lapdock setup. I believed it would solve all the issues I had with the original RPi model B. See below for the final build and read on for how it came together.
Somewhere around four years ago I had an unfortunate accident with my old HP 510 laptop which resulted in a thumb going through the LCD screen. This left me without a laptop, which was not too bad as I still had a perfectly fine desktop and an iPad. The only problem with this setup is that the desktop isn’t really portable and the iPad leaves a little to be desired in applications and multitasking. I did try sporadically for a while to get by with the iPad alone, following in the footsteps of people like Mark O’Connor, but it really just didn’t work well for me.
I had it in my head for a while during this time to try to do something interesting with the Raspberry Pi as all I had previously done was make it into another media center. I thought a laptop built around it would be great, but really didn’t find any good and cheap ways to achieve it. That was until I found the Lapdock series of netbook-like devices normally powered by smartphones. The lucky part to me is that the lapdock was a commercial flop leaving a lot of stock in the secondary market for cheap. I found a couple examples of people successfully using them with the RPi and figured, why not. I started doing some research and built the parts list for my own build.