The Pi-Top: Print your Own Laptop for Under £150

I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up my laptop. It was obsolete out the box, the fan acts more like a blacksmith’s bellows than a coolant system, one of the hinges is hanging on by a thread and it sounds like a distant motorway.

 

The worst thing is, there’s nothing I can do about it. I mean, I could take it into the shop and pay for someone to shake all the dust out of it and look through my holiday photos, but I’d rather not hav. I can’t buy the proprietary parts to fix it up, and even if I could, I’d have no idea where to start tinkering.

 

If only there was a laptop device for which I could print off my own parts, customise my electronics and modify it’s shell. Wait, what’s this…?

Meet the Pi-top – the new DIY kit that allows you to print and compose your own laptop, teaching you electronics and programming along the way. Pictured above is the slick looking prototype which they hope to fund with a Kickstarter campaign that launches October 14th (for news on that, check out their Facebook).

 

The Pi-top’s design is made of four main parts and takes about 75 hours to print (which seems long but pales compared to the previous design’s 160 hour print time), and can require a tense live swap of filament rolls. Alternatively, they offer to send you an injection-moulded shell as part of a pre-built kit.

 

The laptop runs on the Raspberry Pi Model B+, and it will have a surprisingly large HD LCD 13.3” screen, a solid 6-8 hour battery life (a good 6 hours longer than mine), WiFi, a laptop keyboard (not Bluetooth) and a slidable panel that allows you to access the electronics without a screwdriver for easy customisation; all of this running on the Raspberry Pi Optimised ‘Raspbian’ Operating system.

 

The most exciting element for this writer however, is their “beginner to advanced Hardware & Software Innovation lesson plans” – which looks like an innovative gamified learning platform that guides you through the construction of your laptop, giving you fundamental programming, printing and circuitry knowledge you can apply to your own projects.

                                                                             

A Pi-top spokesperson announced on Reddit “Recently we taught students in Birmingham, UK how to create a basic LED circuit, then code that circuit to turn on using the Pi-Top – using that knowledge students were then able to code a basic robot using the transferable skills they gained earlier from LEDs. This was all done in 3 hours.”

 

The learning platform is completely free, but the laptop itself is projected to cost $229 (£142) for an earlybird kit, with the eventual retail price being under $300.

 

 

If you want to have a try at your own 3D printed maker projects but don’t feel like jumping in at the deep end, check us out at MakerClub.org for fun family electronics projects, and sign up to hear about our very own IndieGoGo campaign we are launching this October!