Very cool - amazing that you can fit something that small in your pocket and it can also power a full size monitor & keyboard. It sounds like the Hackberry Pi is a great fit for your use case. I hadn’t considered using the Bumble Berry like that, but now that you mention it, I might try it out like that next time I travel.
It would be nice to have the beefier Pi 5 on Bumble Berry for the rare times that I need a GUI. I mostly use terminal on this device so it’s usually not a problem, but when I do have to use the full GUI I find the 3b+ annoyingly slow.
I briefly tested the Bumble Berry battery with a Pi 500 and although I got an error message saying that the power supply is not capable of supplying 5A, it seemed to run just fine. The battery is rated to 3A, and streaming full screen video on a 4K screen seemed to draw only about 1A (measured by a usb-c pass-thru dongle). However, I did not push the Pi 5 to its limits and I haven’t used it for an extended amount of time so I can’t confidently say how well it would work.
If you’re willing to pay the extra cash and want a smaller form factor it sounds like Hackberry is definitely the way to go.
The Bumble Berry has a touchscreen, so if you need to use the Raspberry PI OS GUI, you can simple use your finger as a mouse pointer. I've found it works pretty well for the rare occasions that I need to start the GUI.
However, I mostly use this unit in terminal, which means I boot to terminal and only occasionally start up the GUI with startx when I need it.
I use terminal because: I'm trying to brush up on my terminal skills and most of my use-cases are covered in terminal with applications. Some of my favorite terminal applications are:
tmux - for managing multiple terminal windows
nano - for writing code (occasionally I use vim)
tty-clock - nice clock screen saver
lynx - text based web browser. works surprisingly well on some sites like wikipedia
epy - ebook reader - great for reading classic free ebooks from Project Gutenberg
doom - because doom
cmatrix - matrix-style screensaver - looks really cool
My main use case is for learning new code languages - it's nice to have a handheld device on me to practice writing code when I have a few minutes on me but don't have a laptop
The Hackberry looks awesome. I was going to build/buy one, but I wanted a slightly bigger screen and keyboard, and I also wanted to save some money by using an old 3b+ I had laying around. And I wanted to be able to build it quickly from off-the-shelf Amazon components. So all-in I think I spent ~$70 on this one, whereas the hackberry pi would have cost about double that, and then I would have had to buy the CM5 module.
Curious to hear of your experience with the hackberry - I still might consider getting one of those myself.
You might need to design a new back panel for the enclosure.