I do a lot of traveling where a laptop is too much: won't fit in the airline seats I'm willing to afford, or won't survive weeks in a bicycle saddlebag. And so I've cobbled together a setup that lets me do terminal-based development anywhere: Raspberry Pi 5, powered by a USB battery pack, sits nearby. On table (or airline seat tray) sits an Android tablet running a terminal app, and in my lap sits a keyboard. The keyboard talks to the tablet using bluetooth, and the tablet connects to the Pi over wifi.
The weak link is the Pi5: I'd love to have more than 8g of RAM (to run Android dev tools in an x86 emulator, for example) and faster/more reliable storage than a memory card. And so my question: Is there a class of computers out there low-power enough to run for hours on a USB battery pack but significantly more capable (and perhaps more "standard", e.g. able to run GRUB2 and generic Debian) than the Raspberry Pi 5? I figure a fanless and USB-C-powered NUC clone might be a starting point, but they don't seem to exist, which has me thinking power requirements and heat generation are still too high when using Intel chips. So maybe it has to be ARM-based? Anyway, I figure this group will know. Thanks, --Eric House
