Anyone going to try out the interesting looking Radxa Rock 4D? You can view the mainline kernel support status here
That might breath a bit of life into my poor PiTop3 laptop. I do love the form factor and usability, but it could really do with a refresh of processing capabilities!
I was hoping that there would be a new adaptor board to purchase, so we could put in a Pi5 (idiot pi4 with the reversed USB and LAN positions!). Just a board to be microHDMI and the Power and GPIO pins. Possibly needing a new power brick too I guess, but still it would be better to use than a CoPilot Windows 11 laptop in my opinion. Has that ever been a consideration? If not, does anyone know of a project for such a board to be manufactured? I’d be keen.
1 Like
If you go for it let us know how the RK3576 goes! It should certainly be streets ahead of the RPi 3B+, especially with up to 16Gb RAM and likely ability to benefit from Collabora’s open source drivers for its Mali-G52 MC3 GPU.
I think a lot of the pi-top community members were hoping for that but RPF keep changing the port layout…and other SBC vendors then copy them. Brian Corteil (of CamJam and Pi Wars fame) stated a few years ago on Tom’s Hardware Pi Cast that he was working on an adapter design but that still seems to be in concept phase (?). Maybe try getting in contact with him in case he has an update or a Git repo you could view?
Even if you could fit it in the pi-top [3], I’m not sure a RPi 5 would really be worth it to be honest, especially when compared to the Radxa Rock 4D. The whole point of the Raspberry Pi, that spawned the pi-top, was to help school IT labs educate future generations AWAY from Micro$oft’s triple E, state-capture philosophy and that was BEFORE this hallucinatory spyware as a service, end user abuse that is CoPilot and Recall. Never forget that when pre-installing VSCode (rather than the telemetry-stripped VSCodium) in RPiOS, the RPF also pre-installed Micro$oft’s keys, effectively giving them remote root access to your system by default.
It sure is tempting. The only supplier to Australia is AliExpress, which is a bit of a decoy. The tech spec’s look good until you get to the power consumption. 5v @5A would most likely half the PiTop3 battery life when portable. And then, i’d need to hope that the little adaptor board supplied in the PiTop3 could deliver the power without letting the smoke out too.
3B+ is 2.5Ah
4B is 3Ah
5 is 3Ah (minimum, with USB limited to 600mAh) 5Ah at full utilization.
You are right though, the price of the little SBC’s have grown quite a lot since the Pi3 era. I only have one 4B, and no Pi5’s for that reason. I have lost count of my Pi3B’s and ZeroW’s around the house though!
I personally have zero interest in installing Windows 11 on my gaming PC (i7 7700k, 980Ti) which will easily run their spyware. It is safely on Fedora now, and Steam hasn’t missed a beat. I do miss Fusion 360 though, struggling to learn FreeCAD for 3D printing.