Building my Own Laptop

#1

Post by beambot » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 6:27 PM UTC

Building my Own Laptop
bunniestudios.com

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#2

Post by noonespecial » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

It's like watching a Jedi construct his own light-saber.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#3

Post by CaioAlonso » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 7:43 PM UTC

>so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs

So this means that this will probably appeal to the free software people that only use 100% free computers?

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#4

Post by semisight » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 7:46 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #2

It's like watching a Jedi construct his own light-saber.

If not more ambitious, considering the small, unfriendly nature of laptop hardware. Good luck to OP!

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#5

Post by rhizome » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 7:59 PM UTC

CaioAlonso wrote: post #3

>so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs So this means that this will probably appeal to the free software people that only use 100% free computers?

Them, and more. As we've seen over the past couple of decades, these efforts lead to extreme commodifications of technology.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#6

Post by magicmarker90 » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 7:59 PM UTC

Its like this. Your laptop is bad. Stop using the old way of designing and figure out a new design.

gl. wp. gg

no re

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#7

Post by beambot » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 8:03 PM UTC

Incidentally, the guy creating this is Bunnie Huang -- the guy who designed the Chumby, was famous for Xbox hardware hacking, and did an awesome (open-hardware) MITM attack on HDCP at CCC [1,2].

[1] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4686.en.h...

[2] video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37SBMyGoCAU

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#8

Post by guylhem » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 8:15 PM UTC

If only for the integrated FPGA, I'm interested!

One suggestion: it could be made cheaper and maybe more interesting by removing the screen altogether (there's an HDMI port !) to do a C64-like computer, with a tiny smartphone-like internal screen.

We all have multiple screens already - such as tablets or smartphones we carry.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#9

Post by marshray » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 8:17 PM UTC

I liked the part (literally) about the Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA.

Who knows what kind of cool stuff that could lead to?

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#10

Post by beambot » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 8:23 PM UTC

marshray wrote: post #9

I liked the part (literally) about the Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA. Who knows what kind of cool stuff that could lead to?

It could make for fun Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications... but I'm not sure which applications are amenable to 200k Samp/sec.

[For reference, my UHF SDR has a dual-channel (I/Q) 100Msps ADC...]