Hey everyone,
I recently bought a Pi-Top[3] in the clearance sale. I figured it would be a nice way to repurpose it as a secondary monitor. With a bit of HDMI cable management what’s the worst thing that can happen, right? 
Turns out, this thing is designed to run with a Pi and not without it. I can’t really fault CEEED for it but there are a few things in this notebook that could be more hacker-friendly.
But …from what I can tell so far is that the GPIO connector is responsible for telling the pi-top controller board that there is a Pi at the other end and that it’s running. So it should be possible to fake a pi by connecting the right pins at the GPIO end of that connector.
And here is my question: Which ones? 
I know I can reverse engineer it with some time but asking for it might be faster. You could make an old hacker happy and put some life into old pi-top[3]s that could otherwise end up in a landfill.