In this tutorial I will show you how to make your Raspberry Pi into a very compact full featured laptop.
PLEASE BE SURE TO READ MY “What to Avoid Purchasing” below, to save you money, time, and your frustration level red-lining. This is a very simple project to complete with very little actual hardware hacking involved. This will cost you roughly $180.00 US dollars to make, at the time of writing this post. I would highly recommend doing this if you can. This laptop has been absolutely wonderful to work with, portable, light-weight, and very useful.
*** Please NOTE; You will find all of the below parts listed on eBay. Trust me when I tell you this, I tried using other retailer websites but the cables I received were at a lower quality and because of this DID NOT WORK for the connections. If your reading this from Europe, you may get lucky with finding the below adapters and cables from local business’s, but from within the continental US,I was not able to locate the correct parts except on eBay. The total cost for all the needed adapters and cables from eBay was no more than $20 US dollars. I was able to find all the necessary parts from various distributors listed on eBay. The downside is that it will probably take 2-3 weeks for the parts to be received. Be sure to pay attention to the lengths of each of the cables listed below on the product websites, you will not need 6ft or 8ft cables for this project. I had a difficult time in finding these cables shorter than 3ft, but they may be out there. Shorter the better, you can make every connection with less than 1ft. I plan on modifying some extra cables I have lying around to better suit my setup. Patients in this project PAYS OFF.
Skill Level: Beginner
Project Completion Time: 30 minutes
Parts Lists
– USB Micro B 5p Female to Type A Male Data Charging Cable Cord 25cm. (eBay)
– Micro HDMI to HDMI Male Adapter Converter Cable (eBay)
– Female Micro HDMI to Female Micro HDMI Coupler. (eBay)
– Motorola Artix Lapdock. (eBay)
– Optional – Long Range WiFi USB Antenna designed for Raspberry Pi. (Sold by Adafruit Industries)
The nice part of purchasing this WiFi antenna from Adafruit is that it allows a better WiFi connection for your new laptop. But the other nice part is that this is the WiFi antenna used in Adafruit’s Tutorial on creating “Onion Pi” TOR Proxy. I had no problems configuring my other Raspberry Pi following their tutorial as a TOR Proxy with this piece of hardware.
What to Avoid Purchasing – PLEASE READ….
When I was initially getting all of my adapters and cables, I have to admit, I was not very patient.
Do not purchase this adapter, it will not work with the Motorola Atrix Lapdock. The reason being is that this adapter does not have a correctly grounded CEC/DDC Ground. The Motorola Lapdock as well as the Motorola Lapdock 100 receives it’s power state from the presence of a signal through the micro HDMI connector. No signal, no video, no power to your Raspberry Pi.What this means to you, simply, your Raspberry Pi will not turn on, nor will it display a video signal to the lapdock. I could go into a lengthy discussion about the electrical properties of this but I will not take up anymore of time than necessary to explain it. There are numerous web posts that describe possible workarounds for this, which I have tried and did not work.
Onward to Construction
Putting it all together
Once you have received all of your cables, adapters and lapdock, assembly is pretty straight forward.
If you are using a Raspberry Pi Rev2 then you can power the Raspberry Pi directly from one of the two available USB Ports which can be used to back feed power from the lapdock’s internal battery and run your raspberry that way. If you do not have a Rev2 Pi then there will be some mods which need to be made to the cables. There are several articles on the web for this modification and will be outside of the scope for this project.
The Micro-HDMI Coupler you purchased simply fits on the HDMI Male connector on the lapdock. Then plug your micro HDMI cable into the other end of the coupler, then into your HDMI port on your Raspberry Pi. Pay Particular Attention to which one of the two connectors your plugging cables into. The connector with a WHITE insert is the HDMI connector. The two connectors can look very similar but aren’t. I haven’t tested what happens if these two are reversed on the cables, but honestly I really didn’t want to find out either.
Post Construction Configurations
By the time you reach this section, you should have successfully cabled your Raspberry Pi to your Motorola Atrix Lapdock. The lapdock monitor should be displaying the boot-up POST screen after you attached the USB male connector into one of the USB ports on the Raspberry Pi. You should then be given the “Raspi-Config” screen if you are using a new, un-configured Distro image. Make sure you set your settings to, BOOT TO DESKTOP , then any other settings you prefer to have configured. Important if you prefer to use the standard US, 104-Key PC Keyboard, this will need to be configured as well within “Raspi-Config”. If you do not configure this, you may find the keys on the keyboard do not correspond to what it is your trying to type. Once you have completed your “Raspi-Config” configurations, select “Finish”, then “Yes”, to reboot the Raspberry Pi.
You will notice that by default the screen resolution is not fully configured for your lapdock monitor resolution. We will need to change this so that the Raspberry Pi uses all of the available screen size during operation. This is very easy to change but will require “root” privileges to the “boot” folder in order to change the screen resolution. There are two ways to change these settings, one way is using the Desktop GUI environment and the other way is through a elevated command line using “LX Terminal”. I will describe the desktop GUI way, since it can be pretty easy to accidentally change other settings within the “Config.txt” using a command line resulting in your Raspberry Pi NOT booting up.
By now, you should be seeing your Raspberry Pi desktop on your new laptop screen. Follow the steps below to change the resolution for full screen viewing.
1. Click on the “Start” menu icon in the bottom left corner of the desktop environment.
2. Navigate to “File Manager”, I right-clicked on it, and selected “send to desktop”. This makes it easy to not only access the “boot” folder, but also the “images” folder where your time-lapse photos are stored to copy to a thumb drive or other media.
3. Once the “File Manager” opens, select “Tools” in the menu bar, and select “Open current folder as Root”.
This will open another “File Manager” window, but you will have full root privileges. BE VERY CAREFUL USING THIS, you can delete or modify any file critical to the operation of your Raspberry Pi. The left column
4. You should see a column on the left side of “File Manager” screen, with “Places” showing at the top of that column. Select the “Down Black Arrow” and select “Directory Tree” and navigate to the “boot” folder, this will be located near the top of the directory tree. Remember, to modify any of these files you will need to be in the root permission level. YOU SHOULD MAKE A COPY OF THIS FILE BEFORE MAKING ANY CHANGES TO IT, and store it either on your desktop or on a removable thumb drive.Locate the file called “config.txt” and (right-click and select open with Leafpad). This will open the file in a notepad text editor application called Leafpad.
5. From within this file there is one change to make.
a) Uncomment or Remove the (#) from in front of
#disable_overscan=1
It should now look like;
disable_overscan=1
An in depth page describing the various settings of the “Config.txt” can be found at.
http://elinux.org/R-Pi_ConfigurationFile
Save the file and perform a reboot of your Raspberry Pi. That’s it.
Side Notes
1. I included a WiFi USB Antenna as an optional accessory. If you do have this make sure you use one of the two additional USB ports on the back of the lapdock to plug this into. If you plug this WiFi adapter directly into the Raspberry Pi while it’s on, it will cause the Raspberry’s power to dip resulting in a reboot.
2. If you plan on Overclocking your Raspberry Pi you may experience some quirky behavior, when typing using the keyboard, the input for a letter will start to repeatedly initiate. Resultingggggggggggggggggggg oop’s. Like that. To remedy this, throttle back your Overclocking setting. I’ve noticed this a lot when running on Turbo and using a Sony Class 10 SD Card with a write speed of 40 mbps (standard speed of class 10 cards). I have not had any quirks or bugs running my Raspbian off of a PNY 8GB class 10 w/ 45mbps. But experiment around and see what works best for you.