Turn a Raspberry Pi into a netbook for under $100

I read about a pretty cool franken-thingy project yesterday and decided I should share it with the masses!

Ras-Pi Lapdock via Hack A Day

Using a Raspberry Pi and a Motorola Lap Dock you can turn build a netbook of sorts. The design is very rough, loose wires and a dangling brain, but it produces cheap functional results.

Since we know that the raspberry pi is capable of running a myriad of modern operating systems and only costs $35, many of us question why so many personal computers have to be so dang expensive! Especially Hobo-Geek readers, who are notoriously poor and jaded! Most of us have wondered why we couldn't just stick some old phone guts into a netbook shell. Then we would have a nice portable device to read emails and surf the web, without the mobile page hating, claw hand inducing, experience that is internet on a cellphone.

As it turns out there have been lots and lots of persuasive geeky engineers at various companies who thought the same thing at one point or another. This has led to the development of the dumb terminal or dumb tablet. A dock with a screen, keyboard, and other laptop accouterments. The Motorola Lap Dock is just such a dumb device. It looks and acts just like a netbook except that it is totally dead until you shove a Motorola ATRIX 4g cellphone up its ass! Then it lights up with joy!

A super cool guy named Alexander Glenn posted a pretty clean set of photos detailing his ras-pi docking solution here! It is by far the slickest I've seen so far.

As you can see rather than shoving a cellphone up its backside, we shove a raspberry pi up there!

The whole thing is pretty cool!
I would like to see a drop in cartridge style slot for the ras-pi attached to the dock lid. I feel like simply sticking the pi to the connectors on the back is a bit flimsy. Why not build a plexi case and epoxy it to the lid of the dock. That way the pi board can be dropped in and the case can be locked. Thus securing the board and connectors from damage.

More lapdocks using the Rikomagic MK802 here and here.

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