that’s absolutely awesome, what are they called? just sharge battery bank?
i got some 8200mah ones in mine, 7565121 form factor. they’re bigger and need custom plates (like instead of the white plastic ones), but they fit fine for me. might be worth the upgrade so you’re not putting them through as many cycles. unfortunately the seller i got them from is gone but the form factor is standard
that’s insane. i think the Pocket Reform’s recent system controller FW update increased their USB C PD spec range to support more speeds, maybe not faster but, more at very least
that definitely makes sense. i run mine pretty hard, it’s replacing my cellphone, and i get ~8 hours to a charge if i use it a ton, 10 if it’s idle mostly. also calibre is peak, and that xteink thing seems awesome
Yup, shargeek 170 power bank. I like the shape and the screen. I had been following your pocket mod thread, and figure I’d take a little swing at at least the batteries (if I didn’t have a need for a whole home network, I’d yank the sim out of my Hotspot and use that for the pocket. But alas.(
i’ll have to go shopping later. i’ve been trying to find a good power bank for my EDC kit to shove in my backpack
i gotta say i’ve been very pleasantly surprised with how many people have liked my mod ideas, i kinda knew i’d enjoy pushing this device to its limits and then some with mods but i underestimated how much others would like it too lol. part of why i got the thing was its modularity meant it can grow with me, so as i get into i2c things i can add qwiic, as i get into more low level stuff and self compilation i could even try making a cpu carrier board in a few years (if MNT doesn’t beat me to the module i want supported lol), as i get into more cybersec things i plan to try making a wifi pineapple level wifi card for the thing and make it truly nightmarish lol
all that said, i’ll grab the .fcstd files for those little battery mount bars i made and upload them to Proton Drive and share them here later today. they’re super simple though, so easy to replicate. if you do go that route, to keep them in place just put some double sided tape on them and press the batteries against it, using the small gap between the bars and edge of the lower frame to cram a fingertip into so you’re squeezing from one edge of the battery and the other side of the bar. i printed mine at, iirc, 1mm walls and like 20% infill, and they have some flex, i’d recommend leaving it that way since if you move the pocket around a lot or drop it, that little bit of flex can absorb the force just enough to keep the batteries from unsticking (and maybe prevent kinetic damage to them if you drop it from high enough, but all that might do is stop them from combusting but atp the device is probably totally destroyed anyways)
I love seeing all these pockets. I just swapped a few stickers out moments ago so it’s a good chance to share. This laptop gets a regular rotation of changes to keep it fun. Ed is looking a little worn so that might get swapped out later this year. I’m constantly on the lookout for things that can fit on the sides. It’s currently sporting the analognowhere design near the hinge in addition to the girl with the floppy.
I brought my Pocket Reform to Everfree Northwest this year in Seattle, I absolutely underestimated how much it excels for writing! I was typing up a storm in just about every panel I went to (probably to some people’s annoyance thanks to the clicky switches). While not having a sleep function (A311D) really stifles the immediate “pull out of bag and start writing”-ability of it, having a little mech keyboard I can type surprisingly fast on really made it such a handy tool for me.
(Tons of people were curious and asking what the hell it even was too, which is always fun lol)
my plan is to buy extra backplates when i fill the back and get sick of the ones on there. MNT sells them so it works out perfectly, eventually i’ll probably wind up with a small collection of backplates
agreed, AI has its uses, 99% of them being in STEM fields, generative is the worst use for it. i’ve got plans to get a usb camera to my pocket and play with things like the thermal cam qwiic sensors and may try some computer vision things with it at some point, personally.
yeah i got the quiet ones for stealth purposes myself, since i’m a bit of an introvert, despite my main desktop’s KB has the clickiest clicky switches i could buy lol
that’s like, the best kind of person, bonus points if you get to infodump or get autistic about things with them and make friends, part of why i’m gonna use the Pocket as my phone, attract the kinda friends i want
Took it to a cabin in rural west Iceland last weekend. Had some fun making some music while it rained. I was planning to use it mostly for music making when I bought it but my main laptop ran into keyboard problems the same week my Pocket arrived so the Pocket is now my main portable computer and will be used extensively at university taking notes and what not during my masters studies.
I do hope though that my other laptop will be back in business before next semester because the Pocket keyboard is perhaps a bit too small for me for writing a masters thesis.
I’ve also been taking it daily to the student run café at the university. I think one of the barista’s has been enjoying watching me bring weird tech lately. Couple of months ago asked me about my Tangara music player. This morning he notices me pull out the Pocket Reform and he asks “what the hell is that?”. I explain what it is, and his reply was “I bet you used to own a Sega Mega Drive back in the days”.
I don’t know how he came to that conclusion and made a connection between niche tech and Sega Mega Drive, but he was right. I told him I had a Sega Mega Drive, and still have, and it’s currently set up and connected to my TV.
Your photo is motivating me to take at least one more shot with the other stuff that’s in my edc. That being the flipper, rtl sdr, miyoo flip, and the xteink x4. I want nothing more than to be able to do the things I enjoy while on the go. The pocket is legit perfect at filling that need, and the community just keeps me coming back.
When it’s not on the road or the couch it serves as my Arm build machine. For couch surfing, it replaced my Fujitsu which now hangs out next to it on the workbench.
I upgraded the A311D to a Radxa CM5 RK3588S2. That made the kernel builds much more reasonable. It’s about 12 minutes for a clean kernel build (no modules), and about 1 hour to build the full kernel and assemble the OS (Arch Linux). That did stress the little Radxa board out a bit, and the temps started causing throttling. Not surprising. I dug through the closet and found the smallest heat sink I had.
At idle it sits around 28°. Even with a full OS build the temps rarely get much above 50°. So I call that a win. The way I see it, if you’re going to build an Arm server, why not do it with some style?
Can I ask how you did it? Did you simply attach it to the stock mnt plate with thermal pad or how did you actually do it? I would be very interested in at least knowing of a method to lower the temperature.
I daily my Pocket Reform (besides my desktop PC). Took it to many places, for many different tasks, I even DJ’ed with it once, using an external audio interface (can’t find a photo of that moment). It fulfills my expectations from a daily usable portable computer very well. Only time I had an issue that I remember was, when I was in south-west Turkey during a bad heat wave, and it constantly got hot (couldn’t passively cool down), but then I sat and worked in front of a large fan, problem solved.
With my UGREEN PB205 (145W/25,000 mAh), I can charge the Pocket-Reform about 1.5 times, which gives me 7–9 hours of battery life with the standard batteries. That’s enough for a day on the go.
ah gotcha, yeah i’ve been looking at ones over 50,000mah at the minimum, ideally over 70,000, i wanna charge it once a week and not have to care outside of that.
Sticking a small passive heat sink on the top did help a little. However the RK3588S would still throttle under extreme loads. So I 3D printed a top with mounting supports for the Noctua sink, and mounted the sink on a thermal pad directly on the chip. The fan is completely unnecessary, it just makes me laugh.
If it’s not obvious from the photo, that whole solution is overkill. If I had to guess, a simple 40mm passive heat sink mounted directly to the chip would likely be enough for most workloads. You could buy an extra top and cut a small port for the heat sink, though printing it out of PETG seems to be working fine.
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It fulfills my expectations from a daily usable portable computer very well. Only time I had an issue that I remember was, when I was in south-west Turkey during a bad heat wave, and it constantly got hot (couldn’t passively cool down), but then I sat and worked in front of a large fan, problem solved. 
