This Pink Toy Laptop Is Actually a Fully Functional Arch Linux Machine

Why do kids get to have all the fun? They spend their days playing while we adults waste our lives in an office. Adding insult to injury, kids even get tech devices with more interesting and unique designs. Those laptops from VTech and LeapFrog are way cooler than the cookie-cutter black and silver rectangles adults have to choose from.

Of course, things don’t look quite so good for kids once you look inside their electronics. If you want to do anything more than run a lemonade stand, these gadgets just aren’t going to cut it. An embedded software engineer named Kati loved the style of the VTech Lern und Musik Laptop so much that she decided to upgrade its hardware so she could use it as a real computer. Score one for the adults!

Kati quickly realized the toy’s internals were far too limited for any practical use, so she wasn’t about to spend time trying to coax it into running Linux. Instead, she took a more direct approach: gut the toy completely and rebuild it around a Raspberry Pi.

This resulted in the creation of what she calls the “PinkPad,” a highly usable mini Linux laptop hiding inside a chunky pink children’s toy. At the core of the build is a Raspberry Pi Zero W paired with a 5-inch Waveshare touchscreen, a Rii X1 wireless keyboard, a USB hub, and a hefty 6,000mAh lithium battery. Kati also added a proper power management setup using an Adafruit PowerBoost board so the machine could run untethered like a real laptop.

Making all of that hardware fit inside the original VTech shell was a big challenge. The stock display and keyboard were ripped out entirely and replaced with custom 3D-printed panels designed to hold the new hardware. The project spiraled way beyond a simple weekend build, with endless problems involving cable lengths, adapter sizes, and squeezing components into spaces never meant to hold them.

Despite the toy-like exterior, the PinkPad runs Arch Linux ARM and includes a complete software stack. Kati installed Emacs, the lightweight Dillo browser, the Herbstluftwm window manager, LXDM, and some terminal eye candy like neofetch and cmatrix.

The black rubber keys of the keyboard didn’t match the aesthetic Kati was going for, so she had to fix them up. After failed experiments with paints and coatings, Kati discovered that ordinary nail polish worked quite well. After refinishing the keys with a pink polish, Kati applied a clear top coat for durability.

In the end, the PinkPad still isn’t a particularly powerful machine. But it can be used to get real work done, proving that adult computers don’t have to be boring.