That's my solution but it's bulky and consumes more power than it really needs to. The beauty of using the raspberry pi for these use cases is its small footprint and low power consumption.
You can remove quite a lot of laptop and still keep a working machine (all you need is the power supply and the motherboard, really) but there's no quick and easy way to do it, you'd have to design a custom case and everything. You'd also need a laptop that will just power on without keyboard, screen, and other peripherals connected, which is not necessarily a given.
Maybe if someone designs a modular enough 3D printed case design for common laptop motherboards so that you can create your own laptop server easily. In a few years, when USB C is available in cheap, old, second-hand laptops, I imagine you can build quite the home lab cluster with old laptop motherboards if you can design decent cases for them.
jeroenhd|3 years ago
You can remove quite a lot of laptop and still keep a working machine (all you need is the power supply and the motherboard, really) but there's no quick and easy way to do it, you'd have to design a custom case and everything. You'd also need a laptop that will just power on without keyboard, screen, and other peripherals connected, which is not necessarily a given.
Maybe if someone designs a modular enough 3D printed case design for common laptop motherboards so that you can create your own laptop server easily. In a few years, when USB C is available in cheap, old, second-hand laptops, I imagine you can build quite the home lab cluster with old laptop motherboards if you can design decent cases for them.
klez|3 years ago