Posted by MakerSam 10 hours ago
I always wanted to know what kind of pants people wear who say that to this device size (see also Nintendo DS & co)
I picked one up a few months ago and I like it.
The Hackberry looks awesome. I was going to build/buy one, but I wanted a slightly bigger screen and keyboard, and I also wanted to save some money by using an old 3b+ I had laying around. And I wanted to be able to build it quickly from off-the-shelf Amazon components. So all-in I think I spent ~$70 on this one, whereas the hackberry pi would have cost about double that, and then I would have had to buy the CM5 module.
Curious to hear of your experience with the hackberry - I still might consider getting one of those myself.
I don't have a 3D printer, so I bought the kit from Elecrow. I had to buy my own CM5, a 2TB NVMEe SSD, and a suitably sized WiFi antenna (that would fit into the case without modification). I also picked up a $60 portable (1k) HDMI monitor because the 720x720 screen is difficult to use for apps like Firefox and Thunderbird. I use an Apple wireless keyboard and an Acer wireless mouse (both Bluetooth). I was surprised that the Hackberry's USB-A ports provide enough juice to power the monitor. It's got a big battery.
The thing is ideal for travel. It can fit into any hotel room safe, or go with you.
Once upon a time I wrote a small script to turn a raspberry pi into a midi device. I really want to be able to make my own custom midi controller, but it's not exactly fun.
However, I mostly use this unit in terminal, which means I boot to terminal and only occasionally start up the GUI with startx when I need it.
I use terminal because: I'm trying to brush up on my terminal skills and most of my use-cases are covered in terminal with applications. Some of my favorite terminal applications are:
tmux - for managing multiple terminal windows nano - for writing code (occasionally I use vim) tty-clock - nice clock screen saver lynx - text based web browser. works surprisingly well on some sites like wikipedia epy - ebook reader - great for reading classic free ebooks from Project Gutenberg doom - because doom cmatrix - matrix-style screensaver - looks really cool
My main use case is for learning new code languages - it's nice to have a handheld device on me to practice writing code when I have a few minutes on me but don't have a laptop