Pinebook Pro?

[Kochise]

I was more thinking about exposing the GPIO pins on the board somehow. If I'm not mistaken, the board is more or less the same as that of the Rockpro64 and that one has GPIO

I don't know whether the board for the Pinebook Pro has these ports, but I assume having a way to access them on a laptop with such a form factor would be pretty awkward, and the best solution would be to have some extension cable that you can plug into the laptop. The problem with such approach would be signal integrity, something that matters with high frequency applications like SPI flashing (which would be the most important thing I'd be interested in).

Remember the Commodore 64's expansion port ? https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Expansion_Port

Remember the original BeBox's geek port ? http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort

Otherwise there's the good old parallel port