Trail Computer

Rachel and I are hiking the Appalachian trail, and I needed a way to maintain both our photo blog and the USAMTS website. I ended up getting a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a Bluetooth travel keyboard, and a few cables. I didn’t bring a monitor because I assumed that most of the hotels and hostels on trail would have TVs that I could use, and I was right.1 The entire2 computer weighs about 13 ounces, or 370 grams, and 10 of those ounces are the keyboard. Also, because the Pi has such limited computing resources, I decided to not install a GUI at all and only use the terminal. I already did all of my development work in the terminal, so this was no big deal. To test or preview the websites, I just deploy and view them on my phone.

There are two obvious alternatives to bringing my own computer:

Either of those options could work in theory, but I’m much more efficient if I’m using the developer setup that I’m used to. Of course, I could’ve tried to replicate my setup on my phone, but it was much easier to just run a modified version of my Arch install script on a brand new computer. The Pi costs only $15 and barely weighs anything, so the money and weight savings would not be worth my time.

  1. I also assumed that most libraries would have HDMI monitors, but turns out, every library we went to in Maine used monitors with VGA ports only. After Maine, I just relied on hostels and hotels. ↩

  2. Not counting components that are required for our phones anyway, such as a charger. ↩


18 September 2024