Bumble Berry Pi: Budget DIY palmtop could give the OmniOne a run for its money

Building a DIY laptop or handheld traditionally takes some serious engineering chops. However, Samcervantes over on GitHub aims to change all that. Not content with a 3-month lead time to get a Clockwork Pi uConsole, the modder decided to build their own.

The differentiators with this build are how little skill is required to put this together and how little it costs. Aside from the 3D printed parts, the Bumble Berry Pi can be put together from parts readily available on Amazon and requires no soldering aside from using an iron to press in the threaded inserts.

The whole thing is powered by a 37 Watt hour battery bank which is integrated into the case, and supplies enough juice to run the palmtop all day long.

The build makes use of a Raspberry Pi 3b+. While this might be underpowered by today's standards, it could easily be swapped out for a Raspberry Pi 5 (available on Amazon) if you are looking for more power. Although, you can expect a reduction in run time if choosing to make the upgrade.

With the OmniOne making waves on Kickstarter at a price of $359, the Bumble Berry Pi not only makes a fun weekend project, but something that can be easily put together for less than $100 if you happen to have a Pi and a 3D printer already kicking around.

All the details of the project, instructions for putting it together, the bill of materials and STL files are freely available on GitHub.