Kev Posted August 11, 2020 Report Posted August 11, 2020 (edited) Here's another iteration on the Zero Terminal projects I've been working on for a few years. For those of you who haven't seen them, I've been trying to design the most usable all in one Pi Zero computer out there. This version departs a little from the previous ones, as it is more focused on modularity, and forgoes a keyboard as standard, though it is possible to add one, as I'll show you in a bit. The goal here was to create something very versatile, allowing for all sorts of use cases to unlock the Zero's potential. Anyways, let's take a look at it. DESIGN The first thing you'll notice is that the device looks a little like a fat smartphone. That's because the entire thing is basically designed around the Waveshare AMOLED 5.5" 1080p touchscreen (https://www.waveshare.com/5.5inch-HDMI-AMOLED.htm). This thing was originally designed for the Raspberry Pi's 3 and 4, but I created a bunch of custom adaptors that let you hook up a Pi Zero instead. More on that in a minute. Around the outside, you'll see various ports and buttons, including a full size USB 2.0 port, micro SD socket for the operating system, micro USB for charging and a power switch. On the side there is a headphone jack, and 3 programmable buttons hooked up to the Zeros GPIO pins. You could set up all sorts of functions for these, like rotating the screen, volume up and down, or launching other custom scripts and applications with a single press. On the top end is another button which turns the display off and on, helping stretch out the 1200mAh lipo battery life, and also a grill hiding a little speaker behind it. The back of the device is where all the potential lies. This includes 2 40pin sockets which connect to both the GPIO pins, video out, camera connector, 2x USB ports, power indicators and more. The idea is to allow people to create and add custom backpacks to change the functionality, depending on their needs. INTERNALS In order to connect the Zero to the display in the smallest possible space, I created a main PCB, and a few smaller adaptor PCBs. The Zero itself is screwed onto the board and soldered directly to it via the GPIO pins. This main board contains a USB hub, power circuit, audio amp, speaker, buttons, headphone jack, and even a vibration motor for custom notifications. There's a micro SD card board plugged into the Zero which extends the card socket, and also doubles as a frame for the other ports at the bottom of the device. The Waveshare display already has some mounting screws, so securing the main board is easy. There's a little header section to connect the display to the main board, and you simply screw everything together. I included 6 threaded inserts onto this board to make attaching different cases simple too. The Zero only has 1 USB port as standard, so I designed a little USB hub circuit on the main board, using the simple FE1.1S chip. This splits the USB port into 4 separate streams, and is good enough for lower consumption stuff like mice and keyboards, as well as the displays touchscreen capability. You'd probably need to hook up external 5v lines for more power hungry peripherals. I'm particularly pleased with the HDMI adaptor, which connects the full size HDMI port on the display to the mini HDMI port of the Zero. I was wracking my brains for a long time on how to connect these in the smallest possible way, and it turns out using two thin PCBs sandwiched together allows this, since you can solder to both the HDMI-A plug component which takes a 1.6mm PCB, and the smaller Mini HDMI plug, which only takes up to 1mm boards. The power section is something I had trouble with. It's based on the Powerboost 1000c design, and was supposed to fit directly onto the main board, but a couple of the small ICs where too fiddly for me to hand solder and I damaged them before making this video. I would have just included the Powerboost board itself, but unfortunately there's not enough room. Instead I used a cheap generic charge boost board, which is fine for this prototype, but doesn't have all the extra features such as low battery indicators, and a better power switch circuit. That'll be for the next iteration. The Zero doesn't come with audio as standard, but thankfully the Waveshare display does have a built in headphone jack for audio through HDMI. So I wondered if I added an audio amp circuit to the pins on the headphone jack, whether I could power a small speaker, and yes it works. Unfortunately, not very well though, but it's good enough for stuff like bleeps and bloops for notification sounds. Audio through the headphones sounds great though, and I added my own jack in there so it's accessible from the outside of the case. This particular jack has a mechanical switch which defaults to the speakers, and automatically switches to headphones whenever the 3.5mm plug is inserted. ADD-ONS As I previously mentioned, I think the backpack feature of this is where you really see the potential of the device. I can imagine all sorts of different backpacks that could transform the functionality of this. Things like radio transceivers, extra network interfaces, games controllers, TV tuners, solar panels, and simple stands are all easily doable. The cool thing is that since it's modular you can swap these on the fly to change the functionality, so say you could change between a keyboard & radio transceiver combo for a packet radio messenger, then replace that with a different operating system on the micro SD card, and add a game controller to turn it into a portable emulator. The first prototype backpack I have created is a slide-out keyboard. When you combine that with i3 window manager, you have quite the productive handheld Linux machine. Even though the Zero isn't the most powerful computer, you can still get a lot done through the terminal since it uses up a fraction of the resources that a GUI does. The design is based on the great mini (Pi)QWERTY keyboard by Bobricius on Hackaday (hackaday.io/project/158454), and uses a SAMD21 chip to turn it into a USB input device. It's made using 3 PCB layers. Firstly, the bottom, which contains the electronic components and keys, then a cover PCB which displays the key labels, then another board that connects all that to the terminal. The slide mechanism is made up of 3D printed supports and tiny screws, and while it does slide, it needs extra work to make it more robust. The bottom layer connects to the top using little spring loaded pins. I've also added a couple of LEDs you can toggle on and off when you're in low light. The final thing is surprisingly thin, at only a few millimetres deep. Although I think it looks good, I haven't gotten it working properly yet. I've talked to Bob about the design, and I think it's solid. The problem appears to be with the chip programmer I'm using to get the firmware onto it. It's one of the cheap ones, and seems to be giving me false verification messages. Anyways, you get the idea of how it could make the Zero Terminal a pretty handy little device. I also created another custom mini keyboard stand, this time using a salvaged Psion 5MX keyboard, which is still probably one of the best small keyboards ever designed. I used a premade PSION keyboard to USB adaptor that you can find on Tindie, and the thing is open source so you can make you're own too. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to go even further to develop a full adaptor case which would turn it into a Palmtop computer, with working hinge, and maybe a bigger secondary battery and USB hub. NEXT STEPS I have registered ZeroTerminal.org, which is currently redirecting to this page. Over the next year, as I update the design, I want to make a website to help build up the platform, showing people exactly how to make these, and showcasing all the backpacks and custom apps other users create. In the meantime I want to redo the main PCB, change up some components like the rubbish speaker, redesign the power circuit etc, maybe even experiment with using the Raspberry Pi Compute Module instead. Long term it'd be amazing to design a custom display board, then the entire device could be shrunken further, closer to smartphone size. Anyways, I hope you found this interesting. I know I have a lot to learn about all this kind of stuff, so any advice from experts is welcome. Please share this video around if you think others will like it. Thanks and I'll see you in the next video. -- This project first appeared in NODE Vol 02, our new indepedent 180 page zine, packed with all sorts of open hardware and decentralized software projects. Pick up a hard copy, or download for free from the zine page. https://N-O-D-E.net/zine/ Source Edited August 11, 2020 by Kev title 1 Quote
