If you can’t find the device you want, there’s no reason you can’t build it yourself from scratch – at least that seems to be the trend in the Raspberry pie community. Today we have a project to share from a creator named Anil, aka one_free_man_ as he’s known on Reddit, who created a pocket laptop device known as the Octapod.
The Octapod is built around a 2W Raspberry Pi Zero and runs DietPi, a low-resource Linux operating system designed for building devices. Supported by a touchscreen interface, it functions as a personalized music player using an app called Lollypop. Anil programmed the Octapod to boot straight into the music playback interface so no extra steps are needed to load your favorite songs.
In addition to the touchscreen, there are also a few buttons that can be used to control settings. A power button is used to safely turn the Pi on and off while a sync button is included to wake the device, launch services, and close the music app.
As mentioned above, it’s built around a 2W Raspberry Pi Zero and also uses a 2.8-inch Waveshare touchscreen with a 3500mAh battery along with a 512GB micro SD card for storage. Holding it all together is an Anil-made case that he built using epoxy, rather than something laser-cut or 3D-printed.
Like most Pi projects shared with the community, this one is completely open source. Anil has made the source code available to anyone who wants to create their own or just see how this one fits together. You can explore the code on the original project thread at Reddit.
If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project, see the full post and look for comments posted by Anil to get an idea of what hardware you’ll need and how to program the handheld. Be sure to follow Anil, or one_free_man_, for more cool projects and any future updates on this one.