When Paul Simmonds showed up to speak at the privacy and security track I hosted at QCon London last week he brought a Chromebook. After my own experiences using a Chromebook for a presentation my first thought was ‘this isn’t going to end well'[1].

The first issue was connecting to the ubiquitous VGA connector for the meeting room projector. Paul had a newer Chromebook than mine, but it still only had an HDMI output for video. He pulled out a nifty little adaptor:

It worked perfectly.

Paul kindly sent me a link to the eBay seller he used – the adaptors are just £4.99.

8 days later mine arrived from Hong Kong. I’m pleased to confirm that it works with my ARM Chromebook.

I’m even more pleased to confirm that it also works with the Raspberry Pi. Last time I looked at HDMI-VGA adaptors for the RPi they were £35, which is more than the cost of the RPi itself. Less than a fiver for an adaptor to use older monitors is certainly much more reasonable.

Sadly it doesn’t work with the HDMI adaptor I got for my 2013 Nexus 7 (even with a charger plugged in), but I always thought that would be something of a long shot.

Note

[1] We’d already had a hiccup at the start of the day with Caspar Bowden’s ThinkPad refusing to stay switched on (due to suspected overheating problems, which just might be cured with a fresh application of thermal compound to the CPU/heatsink – but that wasn’t happening live on stage).