New
#1771
Here's my latest Pi project. It's a Pi laptop using a Pi 4B and a Motorola Atrix Lapdock. The Atrix is a discontinued product that contains a display, keyboard, touchpad, USB ports and a battery. It was designed for a Motorola phone to dock with and provide the cpu, graphics and storage for the unit.
The project isn't particularly difficult but it was time consuming to gather all the required parts. I managed to get the Atrix from Ebay. In order to connect the Pi to the Atrix display, I needed a female micro HDMI adapter which I found almost impossible to get. I was able to locate one but had to wait over a month for it to be shipped from China. I also needed a female micro USB adapter which I was able to order from Amazon. The Atrix would be capable of powering a Pi 3 but not a Pi 4, so I got a power pack that could power an 8GB Pi 4B. Lastly, i needed to modify a USB cable in order to cut the power lead as only the data lines of the USB were needed.
Once I got everything connected and powered up, there was no display so I needed to modify the config file to change the Pi's default HDMI configuration. After that I was able to boot to the Raspberry Pi OS Desktop. The touchpad worked right off and I thought I was good to go. However, when I tried to type in the password to connect to my wifi, none of the keys on the keyboard worked! After checking to make sure I had the correct locale, language and country settings I thought perhaps the Ebay seller had sold me a clunker. However, I believe that the contacts for the keys were simply corroded or something similar because I found that banging on each key 25-30 times got them working again. The attached picture was taken right after I got the password typed in and connected to wifi.
