Thursday, November 21, 2013

Adventures with Pi and Lapdocks

I'm just starting to use my Raspberry Pi (I have a cool project that I'll discuss later), and the easiest, most portable, coolest looking solution for programming on and using a Raspberry Pi has got to be the Motorola Atrix Lapdock.

The Atrix Lapdock is an accessory for the atrix mobile phone that essentially turns your phone into a laptop.  It looks cool, but was very expensive ($500!), so no one bought them.  It's basically a slick looking high definition display, chiclet keyboard, trackpad, and a battery - a laptop with no brains, it has HDMI and USB inputs and two USB ports for other peripherals.

When AT&T and others started dumping Atrix lapdocks for under $50, someone turned an Atrix lapdock and a Raspberry Pi into this.

When I recently looked into doing the same thing, I found that the prices of Atrix lapdocks had risen due to the limited supply (they're discontinued) and fresh demand from Raspi owners.

But, I found and purchased a Lapdock 100 for $40. Cheap price, not cool looking, but it has similar specs so it should work, right?