Raspberry Pi. Craving something strange

I forgot to discharge static electricity on me and ended up frying my Raspberry Pi 5. Tears, disaster, and disappointment 😅. With current memory prices, the RPi5 in Ukraine has gone well past $200. So I had to pull out an old laptop that had been gathering dust for quite a while.

Now I’ve started thinking: if I build something around a Raspberry Pi, then realistically it’s either the still acceptable-in-power-and-thermals RPi4 or a Zero. Paying $200+ for a “dev Pi” without a built-in SSD connector no longer feels worth it, and because of the power consumption and heat, using it in some compact industrial solution is already impractical. That’s my main complaint about it.

I never really liked laptops either — awkward machines with small screens and uncomfortable keyboards. One reason I loved the Raspberry Pi was that you could just throw it into your pocket and connect it to a monitor or a phone, whatever, and simply work.

I’ve also been thinking about phones with desktop mode support, but the whole ecosystem still feels immature, overpriced, and dependent on docking stations.

So now I’m wondering what to work on and work with next.

And a computer that doesn’t support Linux is not a good computer 😄

The RPi5 burned out, and this cheap case — repurposed from an RPi4 and actually better than the official one — will hardly be useful anymore.