How do you feel about this article? Help us to provide better content for you.
Thank you! Your feedback has been received.
There was a problem submitting your feedback, please try again later.
What do you think of this article?
pi-top is a Raspberry Pi powered laptop that you can build yourself, in an evening, without soldering!
And, what’s more, it was originally designed using RS’s own DesignSpark tools. pi-top’s makers used DesignSpark Mechanical as well as DesignSpark PCB with the latter helping them to overcome the challenges of enabling the Raspberry Pi to use the 13.3 inch HD screen.
This innovative development kit extends your Raspberry-Pi’s functionality and makes it portable, providing an ideal platform for makers as well as educators.
The crowd-funded pi-top can be upgraded by swapping out your Raspberry Pi board. The concept was designed to help users learn about computing, programming, hardware creation and electronics fabrication.
The kit provides everything you need to build your own laptop case – you will of course need your own Raspberry Pi to power it. If you don’t have one yet, the new Raspberry Pi 3 with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities is also in stock at RS now.
Included in the kit is;
- An HD LCD screen with 1366 x 768 resolution and eDP interface
- Smart battery with 10 hours run time
- Trackpad and programmable keyboard
- Two-Wire SMBus V2.0 interface
- Power supply
- Acrylic slice
- SD card with pre-installed pi-topOS
- Image-based build manual
The pi-top kit helps users experiment with electronics, create their own PCBs and produce 3D printing projects. It includes CEEDuniverse, teaching users about coding and circuit building.
Crowd-funding allowed the makers to scale up production of the pi-top which has enabled RS to offer it to its customers for the first time.
Want to know more? Read Stuart Child’s in-depth article lifting the lid on the pi-top.