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  • Author Author: fustini
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Raspberry Pi lapdock tricks

fustini

I learned a couple tricks for the Atrix lapdock last night during our Raspberry Pi / embedded interest group at my hackerspace.  One of our members, Jay, had a super capacitor hooked up his Pi:

image

Why would he do this?  Well, the power supplied from the Atrix lapdock drops for a few seconds when the lapdock lid is closed.  The super cap keeps the Pi running in the meantime.

image

You can click on these pictures to enlarge, but there probably still isn't enough detail to know how to hook it up.  Therefore, I'm hoping to get the complete details and will post here. 

 

In the meantime, here's another trick Jay came up with where he uses a small USB battery pack to act as a buffer:

image

The charging input for the battery pack is connected to the lapdock while it's output goes to the Raspberry Pi (or Android MK802 mini-PC in these pictures):

image

 

Cheers,

Drew

  • in reply to Former Member

    Rick: 

     

    Not sure if you're still around, but you're one of the few people who report success using a Lapdock 500 with a Raspberry Pi 2.  Can you tell me more about how you set this up beyond the cables? Did you edit and config files, etc?

     

    Thanks for your help.

  • I am running a Pi 2 on my lapdock 500.  I've found two pre-built cables that no longer require the stack of adapters to make everything work...


    AFUNTA High Quality USB 2.0 Micro 5 Pin Female to Standard USB Male Extension Cable for Data Transfer -5 inch -- available from Amazon and elsewhere, and

     

    CY 20cm Type D Micro HDMI Socket Female to HDMI Male Adapter Cable for Tablet & Cell Phone -- also available at Amazon and elsewhere. 

     

    This reduces attaching a Pi to a lapdock (either a 100 or a 500) to nothing more than plugging it in, assuming you're not trying to keep the Pi running when the lapdock is closed, which I don't care about. 

     

    The only sad thing is that the supply of lapdocks appears to be drying up and prices are increasing. 

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    The 2B+ does have decent / imporved support for small drives etc though which is a welcome upgrade, I will be testing this as soon as mine arrives as I am still concerned about crappy USB cables feeding into that tiny micro USB connector at 2 amps or more + the use of the PI itself pulling the volts below 4.75V

     

    Well see

  • in reply to Former Member

    Miriam Laskey wrote:

     

    is Pi 2 capable of using the dock?

    The answer is probably yes.  I've read of people using RasPi Model B+ with Lapdock, and RasPi 2 should have the same external interfaces.  One thing you can't do with an unmodified B+ (and therefore RasPi 2) is to back-power through a RasPi USB A port.  This is because of the B+ USB Vbus circuitry.  You need a "Y" cable that provides power through RasPi's Micro USB power jack and data through a RasPi USB A port.

     

    I'll come back and provide some links -- I've got to run now.

     

    Update: Here's the RasPi Forum thread where I read that B+ works with Atrix Lapdock, but not if you backpower:

    Raspberry Pi • View topic - I made a Raspberry PI Laptop.  I suspect RasPi 2 would work the same as B+ since they are basically the same design except for SoC innards and non-PoP DRAM.  A+ works with back-powering if you want a really small, cheap solution and can get by with an ARM11 and 256MB DRAM.  Atrix and Droid Bionic work with no trouble.  Lapdock 100 and 500 are problematic, so look at the linked thread to see how people have worked around the issues.  It's not pretty image

     

    For general Atrix Lapdock lore, see the RasPi Hardware Wiki: RPi Screens - eLinux.org