Portable Pi: Cheap Raspberry Pi Zero Hacker Terminal
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2020-09-16
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I recently came across the incredibly cool design for an "ultimate Raspberry Pi computer" by NODE and was inspired to create my own "portable" Pi device. Although, with my concept, I decided to set a few restrictions on the build:
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I wanted to keep the total cost as low as possible
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including the Pi Zero and extra hardware
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I wanted to avoid any custom casings or need for 3D printed materials
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I wanted to make the full design extremely portable / lightweight
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I wanted to keep the build as user-friendly as possible (no soldering, odd hacks etc.)
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With these constraints put in place, I built my very own Raspberry Pi Zero "hacker" terminal. You can see the finished product below:
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I'm pretty happy with the final outcome and best of all - you can easily recreate this yourself with little-to-no effort!
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So enough chit-chat - let's build this bad-boy!
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Note: Most items in the hardware section are Amazon affiliate links
This hardware will not replace your laptop or any other "high-powered" portable device. Honestly, you're mobile phone would (most likely) work better in terms of a compact-sized computer. The concept behind this "portable pi" project was to make something for fun.
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Please reserve any sassy comments about how buying a cheap $50 laptop off eBay would be more efficient than building out something like I have done here. You're missing the point entirely.
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Moving on for those still interested...
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The Hardware
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I live in Canada, so some of the options are based on available hardware near my location. You're likely to find similar hardware close to your own country for better pricing / shipping costs.
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Note: I've decided to use a wireless, USB dongle-based keyboard. You can opt to use a bluetooth-based keyboard, but I just find them more trouble than they are worth (keeping a charge, losing connections, interference from other devices)
Battery: This depends on your location. I was able to order online through Walmart, but if you live in the USA there are plenty of battery-specific vendors available. Find whatever works best for your needs!
You will need a Raspberry Pi Zero W with GPIO header pins already soldered on to the board. (You could also do this yourself manually if you have the tools and skill to do so)
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Li-Ion Battery HAT
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This HAT holds a single li-ion battery and for our purposes will connect with our Pi Zero via the GPIO header pins. You could also look into double-set battery HATs if that is something you would prefer - for my needs a single rechargeable battery works fine.
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Since our main "OS" is purely terminal based, I find you don't really need a li-ion battery with a massive amount of power storage. 2500mAh will easily last a handful of hours mucking about with emails, files and web browsing. Plus, you can always carry a few extras for swapping out on-the-go.
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3.5-inch TFT Display
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A simple and fairly cheap touchscreen display. We won't require our display to render videos or pretty graphics (since we will be entirely terminal-based) so this works just fine for our needs. I am using version 6.3 for this build.
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Micro USB OTG Adapter
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As mentioned above, this item is optional if you feel more comfortable with using a pure bluetooth keyboard. I just personally prefer this method.
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Wireless Keyboard
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In my product demo image at the beginning of the article, I'm actually using an old Logitech wireless keyboard since this one still hasn't arrived. I plan to swap them out once I have it - the Logitech is far to large to be deemed "portable".
I will be setting up this "portable pi" via headless installation with my main Raspberry Pi 4 desktop. Included below are some quick instructions on how to setup the Raspberry Pi Zero for ssh access.
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Preparing the microSD card
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Use Raspberry Pi Imager to write the Raspberry Pi Lite OS to your microSD card
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Once complete, remove the microSD storage device and then re-connect it
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Navigate to the boot folder of the microSD device - we will be adding 2 files here
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First add a completely empty file and name it ssh (no file extension)
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Next add an empty file named wpa_supplicant.conf
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Open the wpa_supplicant.conf file in a code / text editor and paste the following (be sure to change country to your proper country code, as well as properly setting your network name / password):
Unmount the microSD device, then place the microSD card in your RPi Zero
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Assemble the Raspberry Pi Zero with the Battery HAT (li-ion battery attached) connected via GPIO pins, and the 3.5 display connected on-top of the battery HAT's pins
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Turn on the battery HAT switch to power the RPi Zero. Give the device roughly 90 seconds to perform the initial boot
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Note: the display will turn on but only show a white screen - this is normal
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Connecting to your Zero via SSH
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Open the terminal on your Raspberry Pi desktop and enter the following command:
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ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
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You will then be asked if you wish to trust this device (say yes), then prompted for the pi user's password - which is raspberry. After a moment you will be directly connected to your Raspberry Pi Zero. Hooray!
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We just want to make a couple small configuration changes before going forward (mostly for security):
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Run the command sudo raspi-config
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Select "Change User Password" from the menu and change the password
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After that, select "Network Options" and change your device name
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- This will avoid any conflicts of connecting to newer RPi devices down the line
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That's it!
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Installing display driver
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Next we will need to download and run the drivers needed for our 3.5-inch display to play nicely with our Pi Zero (just a blank white screen doesn't help us much). While connected to our RPi Zero via SSH, run the following commands:
If you have snail-paced rural internet like I do, now is a good time to go and grab a coffee while this download completes.
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Once the download has finished, extract the contents and navigate to the new directory and install the driver:
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sudo tar xzf LCD_show_v6_1_3.tar.gz
+cd LCD_show_v6_1_3
+sudo ./LCD35_v
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Once completed, the RPi Zero will reboot and everything should work as expected!
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Installing software
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I'm not going to jump into heavy details about installing terminal-based software for this setup. The links I've attached in the software section should provide you with more than enough information to get started. For reference, I'm using a very basic set of applications:
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Neomutt (emails)
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Lynx (quick and simple web browsing)
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Nano (writing notes / blog posts in a hurry)
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Vim (making any config edits or project work)
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Final Summary
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There you have it - a terminal-based, portable Raspberry Pi Zero "hacker" device.
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Is it practical? Not really. Can it replace any other portable device you might own? Probably not. Is it fun to make and experiment on? You bet! And in the end - isn't that what matters most with pet Pi projects?
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