Meet the Pi-Top, the 3D-printed Raspberry Pi laptop. Via treehugger
We love featuring cool Raspberry Pi projects and we love cool 3D printing projects. The Pi-Top is the perfect marriage of the two. The Pi-Top is a 3D-printed Raspberry Pi laptop that people can build themselves.
The creators see it as an affordable laptop that people can customize whether they have access to a 3D printer — which many people will now that UPS stores started offering the service — or use pre-fabricated parts. Plus they’ll get a little gadget DIY know-how while they’re at it.
The laptop will come as a kit and once assembled will have a 13.3-inch screen HD TFT LCD and fully integrated keyboard and touchpad, much like a standard laptop, but with the added bonus of teaching people how to build a computer. The kit, which will hit Kickstarter soon, will include the Raspberry Pi Model B+ board and case, plus a battery with over six hours worth of power on a single charge, Wi-Fi antenna, and the latest Raspbian OS.
When making the prototype, the creators had print it in three separate parts with the full print time hitting 160 hours.
Much like the makers of the Raspberry Pi, the Pi-Top team has big dreams for their device being used as an educational device.
The makers told Reddit, “Pi-Top is built to be used by anyone. Starting off you will learn the basics and as time goes on you will become more advanced. For example recently we taught students in Birmingham, UK how to create a basic LED circuit, then code that circuit to turn on using the Pi-Top – using that knowledge students were then able to code a basic robot using the transferable skills they gained earlier from LEDs. This was all done in 3 hours.”
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