The Slurptop: a home-built luggable powered by cordless-tool batteries

The author of slurpburgers.com decided not to buy a ready-made laptop but to spend two months designing and building his own. He offers no real justification beyond "because I can, and I want to" — and figures that's sometimes enough. Having already made a Writerdeck and a Cyberdeck on Raspberry Pi boards, he wanted a proper portable x86 machine.

From idea to hardware

He first looked at mITX boards with Intel N50/N100 and PicoPSU power, but they turned out pricier than a Raspberry Pi, hungrier for power, and barely faster. So he settled on a GMKtec M5 Ultra mini PC with a mobile Ryzen 7 7730U (8 cores), 64 GB of RAM and an NVME drive — enough for coding and light design work.

Powered by a drill battery

The centerpiece is running the machine off a 24-volt Kobalt power-tool battery. It satisfied both the cyberpunk aesthetic of improvised parts and the practical needs. The mini PC expects 19 V / 5 A, while the battery swings from ~25 V down to 19 V as it drains, so a buck/boost converter rated 300 W / 10 A gives plenty of headroom. To avoid over-draining the cells, a low-voltage cutoff board was added, and switching between battery and mains is handled by an off-the-shelf Teyleten Robot UPS module. Charging is left to the stock battery charger.

Case and input

The case was modeled in Blender: the author makes 3D models of literally every component, following a "measure ten thousand times" approach. The screen and frame parts fit his printer bed (340 mm) with under 2 mm to spare. An aluminum bar is embedded for rigidity, and the handle sits so snugly between the case parts that it stays locked in place even without its own bolts.

The display is a 14-inch 1920×1200 panel over USB-C (he wanted 4:3 but only the budget-friendly 16:10 fit). The keyboard is a custom 82-key build, and in place of a mouse there's a homemade trackball: a ball in a cradle riding on three ceramic bearings above an ADNS-9800 sensor harvested from a Corsair gaming mouse.

Software and battery life

The machine runs CachyOS — the author cheerfully calls himself a "filthy casual" intimidated by the Arch installer, while also using the build to test Linux ahead of a dual-boot switch. With a 4 Ah battery he gets over four hours under light load and plans an 8 Ah pack for "10+ hours." His verdict is brief: the project hit every requirement, and it looks rather handsome too.

Source: Lobsters