Because this topic came up in c/technology and I was wondering.
Would this be feasible? How bad would it be to your social life?
I’m looking for these scenarios:
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No smartphone, but have a dumbphone and a computer
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No phone at all, but have a computer
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No smartphone, but have a dumbphone, no computer
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Nothing at all
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 bought 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. If i add a wireless keyboard and mouse then its gets a bit heavier again of course.
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.
Thanks for sharing, appreciate all the details ! Agree the modularity is a big win together with the price.