Can I ask what is the advantage of the orangpi/powerbank/touchscreen compared to regular laptop ?
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unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
I live in Germany. For the moment, i do not require a phone for anything in my life. I use it as an nfc card reader for my ID, but there are usb readers that could replace that. All other things also would continue working without a phone. Email, matrix, osm, music all work on a laptop or raspberrypi.
SoulKaribou@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
I gotta admit reason No. 1 is “because why not”. It was a fun project that i learned lots from.
2 is modularity. If i want to be able to easily upgrade or modify the fundamental parts of the system, this makes it super easy. Even with a 2000€ framework which is the king of modularity, you cant just get a completely different display or a battery twice the size.
3 is price. This whole setup cost me like 300-350€ which is a good price even if you bough a used laptop.
I havent actually looked at the battery life of other devices so idk how it compares. Without the screen this bundle has ~40-50h battery life. With the screen its around 8-10h which is more than enough imo. For like 40€ i could buy a powerbank twice the size and double that.
Weight is also pretty good with around 1.4kg for everything. The screen is a metal frame one that weight 1kg but there are also plastic frame ones that weight 500g which would get it to 900g in total.
The biggest downside at the moment with this kind of thing is firmware/OS support. The orangpi support is not amazing. Using a custom OS called ubuntu-rockchip its working pretty well overall and has things like hardware acceleration working so it runs most normal applications just fine, but suspend is not working for example. Watching videos is basically the most intensive thing you can still do on this thing, but all the basic stuff works fine.
SoulKaribou@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Thanks for sharing, appreciate all the details ! Agree the modularity is a big win together with the price.
RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Germany is great in this regard, you have coin machines everywhere and the cash and privacy culture seems to be very strong.