Repurpose Optical Drive With Raspberry Pi

[rumbero]

www.instructables.com/Re-purpose-Optical-Drive-With-RPi

»[...] I thought about what I could put in there instead and realised I could embed a Raspberry Pi inside my computer that I could use for projects on the go and more programmable IO for my computer. As this idea evolved I came up with the idea of powering the Pi form the power provided by the laptop to run the optical drive and connecting to the Pi from my laptop using VNC. [...]«

I wonder if instead of a Raspberry Pi using a more capable mini computer would be feasible...

[unixed]

The raspberry pi 4 (especially the compute module) with 8GB RAM would be a good fit for a T60/T61 frankenpad.
It would be an interesting alternative if networking with other units was not available for any reason.

[L29Ah]

www.instructables.com/Re-purpose-Optical-Drive-With-RPi

»[...] I thought about what I could put in there instead and realised I could embed a Raspberry Pi inside my computer that I could use for projects on the go and more programmable IO for my computer. As this idea evolved I came up with the idea of powering the Pi form the power provided by the laptop to run the optical drive and connecting to the Pi from my laptop using VNC. [...]«

I wonder if instead of a Raspberry Pi using a more capable mini computer would be feasible...

If you only need PIO, a better approach would utilize FTDI boards, as they're more convenient to use from the thinkpad itself, attach to USB readily and are much more energy efficient.

[axur-delmeria]

There's the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which has a quad-core Cortex A53 SoC running at 1GHz and 512MB of RAM. A bit slower than the RPi 3B (quad-core Cortex A53 @ 1.4GHz) and half the RAM.