After spending 2 years doing nothing but sitting on the floor as a file server, running ADB, minicom, & fastboot, sucking 15W, the lion kingdom's macbook battery puffed again.  It was originally a way to connect the home network to LTE, but this was eventually replaced by wifi on the piano signal processor.  It was never completely discharged.  It only got discharged a few hours for testing radios.  So interest in a home brew laptop returned.

The lion kingdom has all the bits required for a minimal laptop.  There's now a recycled 1366x768 panel, HDMI converter for the panel, odroid from many years ago, raspberry pi model 4B, 16GB SD card, touchpad, keyboard, random batteries, random buttons.  The touchpad & keyboard just need a microcontroller to translate the HID protocol.  The HDMI converter needs 8V.

The odroid was so expensive it burned a hole in the lion kingdom's pocket for many years, but it's a loss because of its 2GB of RAM while the pi has 4GB.  In some far fetched idea, it could be a headless server of some kind running along side the raspberry pi.  Raspberry pi 4B's now all run 64 bit linux.  

The macbook's mane value was its 1TB SSD & it's going to be a loss.  Salvaging it would require converting the macbook interface to USB.  

This particular conversion would cost more than a non scam 2TB drive.

https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/External-SSD-Enclosure-for-Select-Mid-2013-to-Mid-2015-Macs/IF107-154

Most of the 2TB drives being sold today are scams.

It's nearly impossible to get 1TB in an SD card.  Any replacement would be USB while the SD card would store the executables.  The raspberry pi can also boot off of USB.

This leaves an enclosure. The simplest solution is packing the raspberry pi in the keyboard instead of having a separate box.  The screen hinge is the biggest challenge.

The lion kingdom could migrate to a headless raspberry pi right away.