The Year of the Linux Mobile

When you see this elegant little device, there’ll be no doubt in your mind whatsoever that it is Year of the Linux Mobile.

Here we’ve got a Raspberry Pi 1 - the original Model B from 2011, slotted onto a 4" Waveshare touchscreen, powered by a power bank. You may have noticed that aside from the wiring the most striking feature is surely the TP-Link wireless dongle.

On the software side, it’s running DietPi with a custom window manager (WIP for now) with a phone-like home screen, one active app at a time, and a bottom bar to switch between the menu and minimized windows. Aside from bug fixes (making it work in any practical sense), a feature I’ll need is an onscreen keyboard. At the moment I’ve got a bluetooth dongle next to the wifi dongle to talk to a tiny keyboard.

Getting the screen right required some RTFM in the form of the Waveshare wiki’s entry on the 4" touch panel. Without any setup, the display tiles and has wide black bars horizontally and vertically.

The real reason I got the screen was for the Pi Zero pocket terminal project, although I’m not sure I can bring myself to disembowel the Blackberry Q10 (just yet). In the meantime I’m happy to have created a minimum viable monstrosity that could technically function as a mobile handheld terminal: as long as I had a wifi hotspot, I have a wireless battery powered touchscreen pi that could ssh into something from a field miles from home - however clunky the device itself is. Anyway, the Pi Zero 2W arrived yesterday. When the GPIO risers, I’ll swap this thing’s brain out then it’s onto a less messy way to wire in power.