Pi zero inside Multibay, part 2: I dont even.

18/12/2019 by piro

If you follow for some reason my posts, i've been struggling with getting juice out of SATA slimline connector to power raspberry pi, that was to be put inside Thinkpads ultrabay.

And I've made it work.

And realised I've lost ultrabay space. In addition, fooling the ultrabay connector that SOMETHING is connected to id made my thinkpad beep at start with warning that it cannot detect the drive.

So, naturally, I've decided NOT to allow any compromises, because they're sign of weakness, and have both things alltogether.

DID YOU KNOW SATA DRIVES DONT NEED TO TAKE ALL THE SPACE IN 2.5 ENCLOSURE?

Some shots of work in progress:

Power lines soldered to ssd pcb, this was most intrusive point where something could go wrong.

SSD Pcb overlayed on top of PI Zero PCB, cables soldered, not arranged.

Added DIP-switch to have some control when I want it On or OFF, in case i want to safe on battery.

The whole DIP switch wasnt neccessary, but i wanted to troll people showing them this image and telling them it overclocks the drive.

Looks cool, all ports accessible, there is plenty of space for small accessories in ultrabay to connect (like external receivers / pendrives)

Mounted in ultrabay, unless someone eject it from laptop, there is no change of guessing there is computer inside computer.

Things i'll add to it, because its not pointless enough:

Small accumulator to make it run for several minutes between restarts of laptop.

OLED screen to display (outside of the thinkpad bay, will require some dremel work) IP adress and uptime/network usage

WIRED two-way of communication between thinkpad (i use windows on my laptops) and pi zero, probably will require adding some internal cables with USB lines. So it could act as an another usb drive OR input device controlled from... anything that can SSH into it.

At some point of making this mod, someone asked me why. I've never asked this myself, at some point I just wanted to do it to be sure I can.