This New Raspberry Pi Laptop Is Actually Pretty Good, CrowPi L Hands On

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at a brand new raspberry pi 4 powered laptop and you know i've actually taken a look at a few on the channel this one has turned out to be my favorite so far this is known as the crow pi l and they've done a lot of upgrades with the l version it is coming in a bit cheaper than the original crow pi and it's got a built-in battery so it is a real portable laptop that will last up to three hours with the raspberry pi 4. so yeah i think they've done a great job redesigning the crow pi the original one did have a really nice screen on it but it was a bit lackluster given that it didn't have a built-in battery and after all i mean these are supposed to be laptops that are fully portable and this one here does have a five thousand milliamp hour battery really easy to set up with the raspberry pi 4 and some of you might be thinking why didn't they just go with the cm4 and it really comes down to availability right now it's really hard to get your hands on a cm4 at the time of making this video so inside of the box obviously you're gonna get the crow pi l also comes with a wireless mouse but there is a track pad built into the laptop itself personally i would just rather use a physical mouse we've got the accessory boards to mount the raspberry pi 4 inside of the laptop and it also comes with what they're calling their chro tail adapter board and the crow tail starter kit which is a bunch of sensors that can be used with this laptop or a raspberry pi 4 in general does come with the crow pi advanced kit or you can go with the basic that doesn't come with all of that we've also got a 12 volt usb type-c adapter to charge up the internal battery it'll also power the unit while it's charging the battery flipping the unit over reveals a couple of hatches one is screwed in that's where our battery is located and this one here is magnetically attached this is where our raspberry pi 4 is going to go so this does have kind of a dual boot system it comes with a little micro sd card adapter with a switch on it we can install two different micro sd cards with two different operating systems and with the flip of a switch we can boot into either one of them really loving what they've done here with the power and hdmi adapter runs on a ribbon cable to the laptop itself and with a lot of these pi powered laptops they just have those micro hdmi cables inside of the unit you got to kind of tuck them out of the way but this comes with the daughter boards we need to get everything up and running and it's super clean once it's installed i'll go ahead and put this together real quick and it's super simple the way this is set up it actually uses one of the usb 2.0 ports to power this board got a little ribbon cable that needs to be installed and that attaches right to the hdmi power board and then in turn we're just going to plug this one ribbon cable into the laptop itself once we situate the pi in here and like i mentioned it does come with this dual boot sd card adapter we can put a card in the top card in the bottom and we can switch between a and b and once we have that assembled we can slide the raspberry pi right in here we'll still have access to the ethernet 2 usb 3.0 ports and one usb 2.0 port it also has a gpio adapter to feed the 40 gpio pins on the pi to the laptop and on this adapter it does have a little fan so we can keep this thing nice and chilly when it's all installed it's just going to plug right in and once it's all set up it looks something like this i mean i think they did a really good job designing this setup raspberry pi 4 sits right in here very nicely we've got that one ribbon cable and the gpio pins going to the main board on the laptop itself and we still have access to the ethernet 2 usb 3.0 ports and usb 2.0 this does have dual stereo speakers built in and over on the right hand side we have our 3.5 millimeter audio jack full size hdmi out usb type c and we've also got that crowtail adapter so for the crowtail accessory board it plugs directly in here and if you have the crowtail sensor kit you can plug in a ton of different sensors and control them directly from the raspberry pi laptop like i mentioned we have taken a look at a few different raspberry pi powered laptops on the channel but every single one of them needed to be plugged into the wall luckily this one here does have a thousand milliamp hour battery they're claiming up to three hours of battery life and one thing i really like about this is the screen it's only an 11.6 inch but it's ips it's got great colors we can control the brightness directly from the keyboard using the function keys it does have a built-in camera and overall i think they did a pretty decent job with this unit now shoving a raspberry pi 4 in the bottom of something like this is going to make it a bit thicker than a regular laptop with a ryzen apu in it or even an intel cpu so i'm not going to fault them for that but you know it's definitely a thicker laptop because we've got a raspberry pi 4 shoved in the bottom of this if they were able to use the cm4 they could make this much thinner but i think what they have here is a really nice little setup so obviously the keyboard is going to be connected over usb because we've plugged everything in we've got this smaller trackpad with left click and right click it works i'm not a huge fan of trackpads in the first place this is not a high quality trackpad and i think that's one of the big reasons they send a mouse with it so yeah i think they chose a really great screen here bright it's an ips display we can adjust the brightness directly from the keyboard and if you see any banding in this video just note that it's due to the camera filming the screen you won't see it with the naked eye trackpad is up here it's usable but i would rather plug in a mouse and keyboard but you could definitely use it if you needed to up in the top we do have a battery indicator unfortunately it doesn't give us a percentage it only gives us four segments but it'll tell us when it's charging or discharging and the operating system here is raspy and it's just a reskinned version of raspbian and by the way i'm using a raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte model in this unit but it'll work with a 1 2 or 4. so if you're familiar with the raspberry pi 4's performance that's exactly what you can expect from here slapping a raspberry pi 4 inside of a laptop isn't going to speed it up any you can definitely do some overclocking because we've got that built-in fan but remember overclocking the pi 4 will burn more energy so you can expect a lot less battery life out of it but one of my favorite things about the way they have this operating system set up right now is the fact that they have pi panel pre-installed now this makes it really easy to program extra hardware with this laptop using the gpio adapter and their sensor kit so with this project here we need the ultrasonic sensor and the lcd panel we can actually just start it up the code's ready to go so you can just start it up here but then you can do a deep dive into the code to see how it works and you can modify it and make it work a little differently it makes it really easy to learn coding with extra hardware on this laptop and we'll take a look at one of these little projects in a second but we're going to head over to the chromium browser after all it's just raspberry pi os with a nice little skin over it we'll head over to youtube and with the pi 4 no overclock going whatsoever it actually does 720p 30fps video pretty well the laptop does have dual stereo speakers built in but they're pointed towards the rear like we saw at the beginning of the video so you really do need to turn this all the way up to enjoy it properly they sound pretty good at max volume i mean they're not blurring or anything like that but it would have been nice to see these speakers kind of pointed or angled towards the front so you could hear it just a little bit better but yeah overall you can do anything on this laptop that you could with the raspberry pi 4 by itself basically we've just got a built-in battery keyboard trackpad and an 11.6 inch ips display and the way the video output on the pi is set up it's actually running over hdmi it's just running over that ribbon cable from that adapter board the crow pi l that i have in my possession was the advanced kit which does come with all of the sensors here's their crow tail kit everything you need to get up and running we've got some ultrasonic sensors leds motors lcds and it does work out really well with their adapter board and the software they have pre-installed i'm just gonna go with a simple four rgb led board here i've already plugged in my wiring to it we'll open up the software we can go to projects and from here we can find one that requires this board so we'll just plug it right in it's got to be on the correct pin that they have it set up with we'll start it and there it is so we've got those leds kind of cascading across and we can actually go in and modify this we can change the colors gives us a nice little list of all of the instructions used for this code that way you can kind of customize it make it your own and just learn a little more about how this works and with that dual boot option they make it really easy to set up two different operating systems with two different sd cards i've set up botocera on another one and here it is so we've now got a little retro console battery powered and you can connect a bluetooth controller because the pi 4 does have bluetooth built in but i just used this wire controller here and with bottocera there was really nothing i needed to do the sound worked and everything right out of the box let's go ahead and get into a little bit of doom so yeah it'll run any raspberry pi 4 operating system and we don't need to do much here because everything's running over hdmi our sound and our video so there's no configuration needed i mean it's just working like a monitor with a keyboard plugged into one of the usb ports so overall the crow pi l is a great little raspberry pi laptop i personally really like this one compared to the others we've tested and mainly because this is fully portable with that built-in battery of course it would be nice to have a much thinner body on this but we're using a raspberry pi 4 here and you really can't get much thinner than this with the pie shoved in the bottom of this thing so if you're interested in learning more about the crow pi l i will leave a few links in the description they're offering two different models here you can get one with all of the sensors and everything already included or you can go with the base model but as far as i can tell you will need to add your own raspberry pi 4. i don't know if they're selling models with the pi 4 included but that's going to wrap it up for this one if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at a brand new raspberry pi 4 powered laptop and you know i've actually taken a look at a few on the channel this one has turned out to be my favorite so far this is known as the crow pi l and they've done a lot of upgrades with the l version it is coming in a bit cheaper than the original crow pi and it's got a built-in battery so it is a real portable laptop that will last up to three hours with the raspberry pi 4. so yeah i think they've done a great job redesigning the crow pi the original one did have a really nice screen on it but it was a bit lackluster given that it didn't have a built-in battery and after all i mean these are supposed to be laptops that are fully portable and this one here does have a five thousand milliamp hour battery really easy to set up with the raspberry pi 4 and some of you might be thinking why didn't they just go with the cm4 and it really comes down to availability right now it's really hard to get your hands on a cm4 at the time of making this video so inside of the box obviously you're gonna get the crow pi l also comes with a wireless mouse but there is a track pad built into the laptop itself personally i would just rather use a physical mouse we've got the accessory boards to mount the raspberry pi 4 inside of the laptop and it also comes with what they're calling their chro tail adapter board and the crow tail starter kit which is a bunch of sensors that can be used with this laptop or a raspberry pi 4 in general does come with the crow pi advanced kit or you can go with the basic that doesn't come with all of that we've also got a 12 volt usb type-c adapter to charge up the internal battery it'll also power the unit while it's charging the battery flipping the unit over reveals a couple of hatches one is screwed in that's where our battery is located and this one here is magnetically attached this is where our raspberry pi 4 is going to go so this does have kind of a dual boot system it comes with a little micro sd card adapter with a switch on it we can install two different micro sd cards with two different operating systems and with the flip of a switch we can boot into either one of them really loving what they've done here with the power and hdmi adapter runs on a ribbon cable to the laptop itself and with a lot of these pi powered laptops they just have those micro hdmi cables inside of the unit you got to kind of tuck them out of the way but this comes with the daughter boards we need to get everything up and running and it's super clean once it's installed i'll go ahead and put this together real quick and it's super simple the way this is set up it actually uses one of the usb 2.0 ports to power this board got a little ribbon cable that needs to be installed and that attaches right to the hdmi power board and then in turn we're just going to plug this one ribbon cable into the laptop itself once we situate the pi in here and like i mentioned it does come with this dual boot sd card adapter we can put a card in the top card in the bottom and we can switch between a and b and once we have that assembled we can slide the raspberry pi right in here we'll still have access to the ethernet 2 usb 3.0 ports and one usb 2.0 port it also has a gpio adapter to feed the 40 gpio pins on the pi to the laptop and on this adapter it does have a little fan so we can keep this thing nice and chilly when it's all installed it's just going to plug right in and once it's all set up it looks something like this i mean i think they did a really good job designing this setup raspberry pi 4 sits right in here very nicely we've got that one ribbon cable and the gpio pins going to the main board on the laptop itself and we still have access to the ethernet 2 usb 3.0 ports and usb 2.0 this does have dual stereo speakers built in and over on the right hand side we have our 3.5 millimeter audio jack full size hdmi out usb type c and we've also got that crowtail adapter so for the crowtail accessory board it plugs directly in here and if you have the crowtail sensor kit you can plug in a ton of different sensors and control them directly from the raspberry pi laptop like i mentioned we have taken a look at a few different raspberry pi powered laptops on the channel but every single one of them needed to be plugged into the wall luckily this one here does have a thousand milliamp hour battery they're claiming up to three hours of battery life and one thing i really like about this is the screen it's only an 11.6 inch but it's ips it's got great colors we can control the brightness directly from the keyboard using the function keys it does have a built-in camera and overall i think they did a pretty decent job with this unit now shoving a raspberry pi 4 in the bottom of something like this is going to make it a bit thicker than a regular laptop with a ryzen apu in it or even an intel cpu so i'm not going to fault them for that but you know it's definitely a thicker laptop because we've got a raspberry pi 4 shoved in the bottom of this if they were able to use the cm4 they could make this much thinner but i think what they have here is a really nice little setup so obviously the keyboard is going to be connected over usb because we've plugged everything in we've got this smaller trackpad with left click and right click it works i'm not a huge fan of trackpads in the first place this is not a high quality trackpad and i think that's one of the big reasons they send a mouse with it so yeah i think they chose a really great screen here bright it's an ips display we can adjust the brightness directly from the keyboard and if you see any banding in this video just note that it's due to the camera filming the screen you won't see it with the naked eye trackpad is up here it's usable but i would rather plug in a mouse and keyboard but you could definitely use it if you needed to up in the top we do have a battery indicator unfortunately it doesn't give us a percentage it only gives us four segments but it'll tell us when it's charging or discharging and the operating system here is raspy and it's just a reskinned version of raspbian and by the way i'm using a raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte model in this unit but it'll work with a 1 2 or 4. so if you're familiar with the raspberry pi 4's performance that's exactly what you can expect from here slapping a raspberry pi 4 inside of a laptop isn't going to speed it up any you can definitely do some overclocking because we've got that built-in fan but remember overclocking the pi 4 will burn more energy so you can expect a lot less battery life out of it but one of my favorite things about the way they have this operating system set up right now is the fact that they have pi panel pre-installed now this makes it really easy to program extra hardware with this laptop using the gpio adapter and their sensor kit so with this project here we need the ultrasonic sensor and the lcd panel we can actually just start it up the code's ready to go so you can just start it up here but then you can do a deep dive into the code to see how it works and you can modify it and make it work a little differently it makes it really easy to learn coding with extra hardware on this laptop and we'll take a look at one of these little projects in a second but we're going to head over to the chromium browser after all it's just raspberry pi os with a nice little skin over it we'll head over to youtube and with the pi 4 no overclock going whatsoever it actually does 720p 30fps video pretty well the laptop does have dual stereo speakers built in but they're pointed towards the rear like we saw at the beginning of the video so you really do need to turn this all the way up to enjoy it properly they sound pretty good at max volume i mean they're not blurring or anything like that but it would have been nice to see these speakers kind of pointed or angled towards the front so you could hear it just a little bit better but yeah overall you can do anything on this laptop that you could with the raspberry pi 4 by itself basically we've just got a built-in battery keyboard trackpad and an 11.6 inch ips display and the way the video output on the pi is set up it's actually running over hdmi it's just running over that ribbon cable from that adapter board the crow pi l that i have in my possession was the advanced kit which does come with all of the sensors here's their crow tail kit everything you need to get up and running we've got some ultrasonic sensors leds motors lcds and it does work out really well with their adapter board and the software they have pre-installed i'm just gonna go with a simple four rgb led board here i've already plugged in my wiring to it we'll open up the software we can go to projects and from here we can find one that requires this board so we'll just plug it right in it's got to be on the correct pin that they have it set up with we'll start it and there it is so we've got those leds kind of cascading across and we can actually go in and modify this we can change the colors gives us a nice little list of all of the instructions used for this code that way you can kind of customize it make it your own and just learn a little more about how this works and with that dual boot option they make it really easy to set up two different operating systems with two different sd cards i've set up botocera on another one and here it is so we've now got a little retro console battery powered and you can connect a bluetooth controller because the pi 4 does have bluetooth built in but i just used this wire controller here and with bottocera there was really nothing i needed to do the sound worked and everything right out of the box let's go ahead and get into a little bit of doom so yeah it'll run any raspberry pi 4 operating system and we don't need to do much here because everything's running over hdmi our sound and our video so there's no configuration needed i mean it's just working like a monitor with a keyboard plugged into one of the usb ports so overall the crow pi l is a great little raspberry pi laptop i personally really like this one compared to the others we've tested and mainly because this is fully portable with that built-in battery of course it would be nice to have a much thinner body on this but we're using a raspberry pi 4 here and you really can't get much thinner than this with the pie shoved in the bottom of this thing so if you're interested in learning more about the crow pi l i will leave a few links in the description they're offering two different models here you can get one with all of the sensors and everything already included or you can go with the base model but as far as i can tell you will need to add your own raspberry pi 4. i don't know if they're selling models with the pi 4 included but that's going to wrap it up for this one if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching you\n"