Motorola in a stroke of genius took a Smart Phone and by plugging it into an accessory device called a Lapdock turned the Smart Phone into a laptop computer. This made the Smart Phone work like a home computer.
The Smart Phone (Motorola of course) is plugged into a docking mechanism and there you sit with a keyboard, mouse, built in speakers and screen ready to watch Tik Tok shorts or hear the latest on cat eating immigrants.
The practicality of the Lapdock goes beyond a Smart Phone in that with adapter cables (Micro HDMI and Micro USB) any computer can plug into the Lapdock. This works perfect with a Raspberry Pi4 or Pi5 and think ahead to POTA and SOTA events as it does have an internal battery.
While the lapdock is no longer a standard product, many pre-owned (used) units can be found on eBay.
One advantage of the Lapdock is space conservation and the bonus roll up of keyboard, mouse, display and speakers into a small package. This screams portable operation with a Raspberry Pi4 or Pi5 which is on par with the original Smart Phone but on Steroids. I say this in that the user has more control of what is installed on and done with the Pi4 or Pi5.
This is another case of using some almost last gen technology to operate with our rigs. This also opens the door for use with my homebrew SDR transceiver and keeps it a compact package. Here is an old N6QW video of the Lapdock with the RPi2 running a Soft Rock transceiver.
Today I hope I opened the door to the possibilities that exist to us as hams, and we only need to open our minds to those possibilities.
To keep things in perspective, the Hermes Lite 2 and SS Amp are on a network and located 100 feet away (connected by CAT 6 cable) from the Lapdock/Computer. Think of those possibilities.
TYGNYBNT. Don't eat your pets!
73's
Pete N6QW