A lot of people travel for work, and I am one of them. My job and my family are ~400 miles apart, and while that will (hopefully) not always be the case I do miss some of the luxuries of being at home. I am not the type to lug around a laptop everywhere, my phone fills in very well but there are some tasks that require a PCs touch. Luckily nowadays you can have your pick at small (less, than credit card size) computers that you can slap a screen on, connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and have a low-cost personal computer that is also extremely portable!

If you’re into things like Arduino and hobby electronics like myself, you undoubtably have a few of these Raspberry Pi’s lying around

The Raspberry Pi is the stereotypical tried and true pocket computer, and one of the most available and popular. It’s a natural choice to pick for our Piputer. Some would say it would be better to use the Raspberry Pi Zero W for this because it is much smaller, but the larger raspberry pi’s have cases with active cooling fans, as well as being more powerful (if not also more power hungry).

One of my favorite stores, Microcenter, sells these large 7” touchscreens made for the Raspberry PI, I thought this would be an excellent choice as it’s not overly large. For me personally 7” is almost the perfect compromise between size for portability, and size for viewing things like YouTube and general web browsing. The back of this screen also has 4 stand-off’s that fit perfectly into the Zebra Virtue case (sans the very bottom plate). It was a bit tricky to tighten the screws, when assembling the case around the attached Raspberry Pi, but it wasn’t too difficult and the result is a very sleek combination of 3 separate products into one functional PC.

One thing I would like to do is add in a small 2,000mAh battery pack to make it actually portable, I’ve tested it in my car (NOT while driving!) using a 2A charger and it worked perfectly. I’ve been able to load GQRX and use my SDR to sniff signals on the go which is very fun, as well as compile a couple crypto wallets to test using it as a mobile wallet. There are a lot of uses for portable and powerful computer, and maybe I’ll go over some in a future post. What do you think? What would YOU use a Piputer for?