For further reading, I highly recommend Bunnie's book on hacking the Xbox.
Building my Own Laptop
11–20 of 91 posts
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#12It would be interesting to know how much this costs.
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#13If 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.
Presumably the board will also be offered on it's own, without anything connected to the LVDS interface. One of Bunnie's previous projects, the Chumby, is available this way.
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#14Incidentally, 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
Sean "xobs" Cross is collaborating on this as well. He's more low-key than Bunnie when it comes to publicity but still worth following if you're into the "Internet of Things" (I kind of hate this phrase, but it gets the idea across effectively enough).
Sean was also at chumby industries, by far the greatest collection of smart people I've ever worked with (sadly, on a product idea that ultimately failed).
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#15WANT! I will buy one.
Meanwhile maybe someone can come up with something based on the Raspberry Pi. :-)
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#16Incidentally, 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
bunnie's history with open hardware design at Chumby leaves me confident that this will be a really fun system to work with. I've hacked around on various Chumby devices (I've got an Infocast 8" running Debian, for instance), and they've consistently been fun, reasonable systems to work with.
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#17If 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.
Presumably the board will also be offered on it's own, without anything connected to the LVDS interface. One of Bunnie's previous projects, the Chumby, is available this way. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10106
SparkFun is awesome, one of my favorite places to buy hardware hackery stuff along with Adafruit and Newark, but if you want to hack on this board for cheaper you can buy Insignia Infocast 3.5 units off ebay for around $40, half the price. The board inside is virtually the same as the Chumby Hacker Board (different arrangements of some of the headers and ports, IIRC) and it comes with a wifi module, 3.5 inch LCD w/resistive touchscreen, speakers, etc.
At $80 for the Chumby Hacker Board most people are better off just buying a rasp-pi, the CPU and memory in it crush the falconwing board and there's a much larger active community of people hacking on it so you get easy access to newer linux kernel versions, distros, etc, but at $40 and including the LCD/touchscreen, wifi, speakers, etc [infocast|chumby One] are still a great deal to use just for hacking on. Still slower than the pi but having the lcd touchscreen/accelerometer/speakers/bend sensor buttons/wifi/etc gives you a lot of stuff to hack on out of the box that you'll have to pay extra for on the pi.
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#18>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?
More importantly, people will be using and modifying these, both in software and hardware, for the next ~30 years. During that time, how many other devices will get left behind because we can't extend and modify their software to meet our new use cases?
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#19Analog battery meter? Why go through all this trouble, and then take a step-back by including some analog meter?
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#20It's great to see that dedicated hackers can get their hands on the hardware and data-sheets needed to design and manufacture these kind of high performance projects. There still remains one huge barrier before we'll see a large number of projects like this: the costs of the equipment used to validate the signal integrity on high speed digital systems like this immense. I'm hoping that soon enough Moore's law will work it's magic in the prices of signal validation equipment and at least a few hacker spaces will be able to gather enough cash to pony up for a 10 GHz scope and a nice logic analyser.