One man's trash is another man treasure: Broken laptops are the new SBCs

Post 00031 | February 27th 2023

For the longest time, Raspberry Pi has been the household name when it came to small project computers that was able to run small, dedicated tasks. However, if there is something that has become obvious during the chip shortage, it's how vulnerable you get when you have to rely on the single supplier. The promise of a $35 computer seems like a distant memory when you look at the current going rate for a used board on eBay. To add insult to injury, it appears business customers get priority access to new batches that are getting produced. While it makes sense from a business perspective, where does that leave hobbyists?

You can go look at competing ARM chips. They are often faster and cheaper, but often lack the community. While tons of projects are being designed specifically with Raspberry Pi in mind, other boards leaves you with Debian and a buggy Android distro. There is however one alternative that might be able to rival the Pi: The good old Intel x86.

"But x64 SBCs are expensive!" you exclaim. I'm not referring to development boards (though you could use those if you fancy). The used markets are filled with old and broken laptops, just waiting for a new lease on life. Here are the pros and cons:

Advantages:

• Cuts down on e-waste: Reusing is always better than recycling, especially if it means you avoid buying something new.
• Great variety of models: Most broken models you see are the flimsily built super market discount models, but if you need something with bigger processors or dedicated graphics, these are also available.
• Generally more powerful than a Pi, although you can find machines on par or even worse as well.
• Software support: While a Raspberry Pi has outstanding software support, it pales in comparison to the O.G. that is the x86 instruction set. If it can't run something natively, there's a good chance it can emulate it.
• Storage included: In most cases people leave the SSD in when they sell it, so there's no micro SD card surcharge.
• Comes with a case, a power supply and a built-in UPS. The "use a spare phone charger" was novel when the first Raspberry Pi came out, but later models use more power than older phone chargers provides and newer phones rarely comes with chargers these days. It's an added expense, and if you want a case as well, it all adds up. On a laptop the circuit board comes in an enclosure, with a built-in battery and charger.
• Expandability: While they aren't as utilitarian as desktops, laptops usually contain a lot of external and internal ports that allows for all sorts of upgrades.

Disadvantages:

• Great variety of models: Not only are there lots of manufacturers, in some cases there's even variation in models. It doesn't appear like you can assume that your HP Pavillion 15 or whatever is the revision with a SATA or M.2 slot. This kind of variation also means that a large amount of models, especially the cheaper ones, aren't as well documented online.
• Great variety of models: Let's hope you're proficient in 3D-design if you're not content with the case the laptop comes in. While it could definitely be nice to mod the case to support a bigger cooling solution, it is more of a challenge compared to what it is on a Raspberry Pi.
• Power consumption: It's unlikely your x64 processor is as power efficient as an ARM based model. That said, they aren't the power hogs they used to be, and laptop CPUs are designed run more efficiently than their desktop counterparts. I found multiple laptops with CPUs of about 4-6W TDP. Make sure to disconnect the screen connector if you plan on running headless as backlights use quite a bit of electricity.
• Bulkier compared to a Raspberry Pi: Even if you don't plan to use the laptop as a case, the PCB will most likely be quite a bit bigger than what you're used to.

To put my money where my mouth is, I purchased three laptops from the bargain bin.

The first one is an HP 14-BS028 with a Braswell era Pentium with a 6W TDP and 4 GB of RAM. It had a cracked screen which is why it was being sold for €60 shipped which is a bit less than a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2 GB of RAM. The system uses about 4-5 W of power while on and is comparable in speed to a Pi 4. It is also completely silent. It's cooling solution is a piece of sheet metal. Add a couple of SSDs and this would make for an ideal silent backup NAS for a family member.

The second one is also an HP, this time a Pavillion 15s FQ1802 with an 10th generation i3 and 4 GB of RAM. While the panel itself was fine on this laptop, the hinge around the pasting had snapped. I paid €70, around the same as a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM. The Core i3-1005G1 has a 15W TDP, which means it runs a bit hotter and needs a fan, but it is also a lot more powerful. This laptop has become my everyday server that runs most of my self hosted services.

The last one is a Dell Latitude 5590 with an i5 8220u and 4 GB of RAM. I paid €120. for this shipped, which is more than a 8 GB Pi 4, but to be fair I knew it wasn't really broken. The seller had shared a "no boot device found" error. Plugging in a new SSD fixed it. Apart from an M.2 slot it has room for a 2.5" drive, but seeing the machine is working fine, it seems a shame to use it as a server. I'll be using this as general use PC.

I bought them from a early retirement pensioner, a student, and somebody had recently been laid off. I was a lot happier being able to help them financially rather than buying something new from some faceless online company.

M.2, our secret weapon

There are two things I've learnt from playing around with these laptops. First thing: HP's product naming department consists of a can of alphabetti spaghetti. Secondly, M.2 slots are incredibly versatile; They are essentially tiny PCI Express ports. While the key system does add some unnecessary complexity to the standard, there are lots of different adapter boards available that can bring lots of new functionality to our portable PCs. If you don't need wifi, you can replace the chip with a SATA controller or an network card - Heck, there are even some with dual gigabit or 2.5 gigabit. While this might not be entirely useful for a normal portable device, it is a godsend to anyone converting a portable into a stationary device.

Ideas for projects

Build a home server
As previously mentioned, I ended up turning the middle tier laptop into server. I ended up installing Unraid to it which was quite happy to create an array of four external 5 TB drives and two 2 TB NVME cache drives. The external drives are plugged into a powered USB hub which are all placed in a custom 3D printed bracket. To avoid power loss, I plugged the USB hub into a 12V CCTV battery. The server is running all my everyday services, including Home Assistant and Jellyfin for media streaming. The CPU is quite recent which means it is able to encode and decode very efficiently. The laptop server uses about 15W at idle and up to 30W at load with all disks spinning. The UPS I used for my old server also used 15W of power while not doing anything (as in, nothing being plugged into it), so you can imagine this is quite a power saving.

Build a halftop
I ended up taking the screen off the Dell even though it wasn't broken. It was pretty easy to remove and its completely reversible. I've started using it as a "halftop", a phrase coined by VWestlife on YouTube. It works much like a Raspberry Pi 400 or 80's micro computers where the PC was built into the keyboard. Being a business machine, the Dell has a great keyboard with number pad and a pointing sticks. All I need to do is plug in power and HDMI and I have a fully working computer, complete with a Windows license key. Of course, the NVME disk is less than two screws away if you want to tinker with other operating systems. In fact, one of the advantages with a halftop is that everything is within arm's reach.

Emulation machine
I didn't buy any laptop with a faulty keyboard or mouse, although I did see a couple of cheap ones. One use case for them could be a machine dedicated to emulating games. Batocera is a Linux distro that focuses on being able to play retro games using an interface easily navigable by a game controller. While it's available for lots of devices, it's the x86-64 build that has support for the most emulators. Depending on the laptop you might even be able to run higher end emulation such as PlayStation 2 and 3DS. You should also be able to access your Steam library. Use your laptop screen as is or, if you are good with a jigsaw, build an arcade cabinet to house it.

Media center
This is pretty much the same as the last one, albeit with a focus on media playback rather than game emulation. LibreElec prides itself of being "Just enough OS for Kodi", the open source media player with more than two decades of experience under its belt. It plays pretty much anything you throw at it and has plugin support for lots of interesting streaming services. That said, Kodi has some support for game emulation built in, and the aforementioned Batocera also has Kodi installed, so maybe it would make more sense combining the two categories into one. In any case, you will be able to play the Sonic the Hedgehog game and movie on the same OS.

Other niche projects
Personally, I've been wanting to built retro server for the longest time, maybe even with dail-in support to allow me to connect to the internet via a telephone modem. It shouldn't be too difficult finding an old laptop with a built-in modem. Or, maybe you want to make a Steam Play streaming server that allows you to stream your games on any device? Find a laptop with a dedicated GPU. Something to control your CNC or 3D printer? Shouldn't be too difficult either.

All in all, I have been quite pleased with this project. I managed to get a pretty good power-efficient server relatively inexpensively and managed to keep a couple of laptops out of the landfill as well.