Pi-Top Laptop

Background
I finally purchased the kit and built one of these using a Raspberry Pi B+.

Assembly was straightforward with the exception of some missing brass spacers. The documentation is poor but fortunately did not need much information to complete assembly. I ordered a prototype pcb for this unit so I can access the GPIO. Besides being an excellent prototype pcb it allows you to attach a 40-pin gpio cable easily so you can use an external breadboard. I happen to have some very long ribbon cables which makes working outside the shell of the laptop simpler.

There is a useful article https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=850719&sid=d58f8fb2a1c81d88b8feefe4973d5273#p850719 for the pin-out of the Laptop hub. I saved the pertinent information and created a PDF of the web post (whicih may someday disappear.) That pdf contains the explanation and diagram from the web post. All credit to the original author.
pi-top-laptop-hub.pdf

2020-01-08 When the acrylic slide cover is closed, simply running the operating system without significant cpu use, the cpu temperature was 60C. Keeping the acrylic slide cover removed the temperature seems to drop to about 51C. This system is running with an RPi 3B+ running at default cpu speed. That is simply too hot and since the CPU has a heat sink installed it is difficult to understand why it's running so hot. It has nothing to do with the operating system or the case (to a certain point.) I installed Sirius to see if that affected the cpu temperature but it seems to run about 1-degree C cooler at 49C. I wonder if my B+ is defective.

pi-topPROTO+

This seems to be unavailable anywhere. It is very useful to do prototyping as it has a female gpio header. If you can locate a Pi-Top v2 laptop with the inventors kit, that seems to be the only way to obtain a Proto+ PCB. Here is documentation for the Proto+ PCB which I do not yet own. Text link pi-topPRPTP+pdf

pi-topPROTO+.pdf