[crest]

I can get a (used) fanless laptop and a USB GPIO/I2C/SPI/CAN/whatever adapter for that money. Raspberry Pis started at ~$30 for a minimal configuration. They were so cheap that they killed the whole overpriced range of $100 to $200 dev boards by vendors that tried to make money of dev boards for their chips.

They have to be cheap enough that tinkers leave them in their projects.

[LtWorf]

But the result is huge, you cannot 3d print a custom case for that and put it somewhere at home…

[taffydavid]

You might be surprised how small a laptop motherboard can be. Once you take away screen, keyboard, battery, speakers, daughter boards and all that, you can have an actively cooled motherboard as slim as a pi and not much bigger.

If you need something really tiny, an esp32 can do a lot of what we used to use a pi for. Driving an eink display for example

[fragmede]

Could you 3d print a case for the usb dongle and the breadboard, and then Velcro that to the laptop?

[LtWorf]

I mean… yes… but you still have a laptop sitting there :D