This Raspberry Pi laptop dongle can load an operating system without using internal hardware

Key findings

  • Raspberry Pis can replace the internal hardware in devices such as laptops to boot an operating system.
  • A dongle developed by a company allows users to connect a Raspberry Pi to a laptop to use its operating system.
  • The idea is innovative, but the dongle can protrude from the laptop and offers no support unless it is on a desk.



Because of their small size, Raspberry Pis can serve as replacement motherboards for all sorts of devices. For example, we've seen a Game Gear and a PlayStation 1 get a second life after someone replaced the broken internals with a Pi. But could the Raspberry Pi also act as a dongle that you can plug into a device, broken or not, and use to boot into an operating system? A company's dongle is designed to do just that.

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Someone presents a Raspberry Pi dongle that can be used to run a “brainless” laptop


As seen on the Raspberry Pi subreddit, this product was introduced on YouTube by Matthias Wandel. The idea is pretty simple: you take the board, plug it into the laptop via three of the side connectors, and you can use the operating system on the board via the laptop. To show how it works, Matthias used a laptop with no internal hardware other than the battery.

When he turned on the laptop, the battery took over the task of powering the Raspberry Pi. The Pi was then able to boot the laptop into an operating system that Matthias could then interact with via the laptop hardware.


This is a really cool idea, but there's one problem. Since it's essentially an SBC dongle, the whole thing kind of sticks out the side. Matthias points out that if you don't have the laptop on the desk, the entire board is only supported by its connectors. And it seems that Reddit commenters agree.

If you are interested, you can check out the official Kickstarter page for this project, which will be live soon.



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