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Building my Own Laptop

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Re: Building my Own Laptop

#41

Post by lostlogin »

jacquesm wrote: post #23
JagMicker wrote: post #19

Analog battery meter? Why go through all this trouble, and then take a step-back by including some analog meter?

Because they're hackers and it's fun. Like having a steam bleed valve on the side of your electric car :)

Great comment. Wow steam engines are great, and at small scale they are even better. Dual action, those centrifugal governors, and the smell of that lubricant oil mixed with hot water. I'd never before considered messing about with small steam engines to be hacking... That used to waste many an afternoon. Don't fuse the safety valve though, that's a bad way to get power and eye brow re-growth takes ages and annoys one's mother.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#42

Post by jakeonthemove »

pasbesoin wrote: post #38
Ives wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only what you're suggesting isn't actually battery maintenance. In fact, it will decrease the capacity of your battery (by as much as a normal drain-recharge cycle of course). Cycling the battery will however appear to improve the capacity by recalibrating the internal circuitry. That's still somewhat useful to a user, but much less than battery maintenance would be. PS: From what I understand this only applies to mo…

Maybe I'm not up to speed on the latest developments, but I currently have two laptops whose batteries have essentially been reduced to short duration UPS's. I should be more pro-active, but I forget, or I worry that I'll discharge right before I need to be charged up. And one sits on a spare table, doing its thing all by itself, much of the time. They tend to stay plugged in and on overnight. It would be nice if, e.…

That's very weird: my laptops stay plugged and on 24/7 for months at a time, and the batteries still last around 2.5 hours. These are 4 year old Li-Ion batteries I'm talking about (they used to last 3 hours when they were new).

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#43

Post by SquareWheel »

andrewflnr wrote: post #32
dfox wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume that building your own lightsaber, given it's form factor, would involve significant amount of laptop-like small, unfriendly electronics (not to mention fiddling with force fields and other advanced physics) :)

You would think, but based on the literature they don't actually seem to be that finicky. Just stick some kind of crystal in some kind of case, with a couple other off-the-shelf components, and that's it.

Only on Hacker News.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#44

Post by malexw »

jacquesm wrote: post #24

This is an absolutely awesome project, mad props to the guy for envisioning it and pulling through. The cost must work out to something terrible but I can totally see why someone would do this. Having an FGPA on there is a very clever idea, it adds flexibility to the design in a way that a prototyping area would but much cleaner. The one corner with all the PWM and other connectors is the most interesting part, I rea…

I wonder what computing would look like if every motherboard had an FPGA on it (especially one that could be rapidly re-programmed).

The only ideas that immediately come to mind would be games offloading some of their logic to a custom FPGA-based co-processor, or being able to have a hardware decoder of all the latest audio/video codecs. But maybe with the speed of current hardware, all of that might be moot anyway.

At the worst, there'd probably be a lot more people out there that can speak Verilog.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#45

Post by w1ntermute »

beambot wrote: post #7

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

See an interview with Bunnie here: http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#46

Post by mrb »

guylhem wrote: post #8

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.

But no tablet or phone have an HDMI input (only output).

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#47

Post by saraid216 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #32
dfox wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume that building your own lightsaber, given it's form factor, would involve significant amount of laptop-like small, unfriendly electronics (not to mention fiddling with force fields and other advanced physics) :)

You would think, but based on the literature they don't actually seem to be that finicky. Just stick some kind of crystal in some kind of case, with a couple other off-the-shelf components, and that's it.

That's how Star Wars treats all of its engineering things. Just give it a kick and it starts up.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#48

Post by guylhem »

mrb wrote: post #46
guylhem wrote: post #8

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.

But no tablet or phone have an HDMI input (only output ).

Imagine a battery-powered C64-like device (ie "all in one", the motherboard just below the keyboard) with a tiny LCD screen (no bigger than your smartphone) and a real-sized keyboard.

Now imagine doing RDP or VNC to "display" the screen on your tablet or your phone - there are browser-side VNC clients that are easy to use, you wouldn't even have to install a VNC client.

Unless you want to playback movies, IMHO there is no need for an HDMI input

No big LCD = longer runtime (or throw in an eink display - framerate is not that important).

I would be willing pay a premium if it also included a breadboard connecting to the various internal ports. That would be a real hacky laptop, a workbench for geeks.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#49

Post by jacquesm »

dshep wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #24

This is an absolutely awesome project, mad props to the guy for envisioning it and pulling through. The cost must work out to something terrible but I can totally see why someone would do this. Having an FGPA on there is a very clever idea, it adds flexibility to the design in a way that a prototyping area would but much cleaner. The one corner with all the PWM and other connectors is the most interesting part, I rea…

Kind of old but there is one, http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/

Thank you for digging that up!

Interesting, he mentions that he'd love to have a triple screen capable laptop, but then when he has a chance to make his own it has two possible monitor attachments. Or did I miss something? Anyway, with USB->hdmi adapters this may no longer be as much of an issue.

For instance:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119...

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#50

Post by rcxdude »

pasbesoin wrote: post #33

Don't know whether this fits, but here's something I'd like from the power system: Automated battery maintenance. I'm plugged in, a lot, and I forget to / blow off periodically cycling my battery. (Admittedly, maybe I'm unusual / an edge case, in this, and my thoughts here are of little general value.) I'd like a power system that can be made to periodically and contextually select to run from battery, even while plu…

Best thing for most lithium batteries is to be kept cool and neither fully charged or discharged. Many phones already try to keep the battery at about 90% or so for this reason, it might be nice if this was configurable on this laptop.

Keeping a laptop on and plugged in all the time, especially if it runs hot, is probably the fastest way to decrease its capacity beyond extremely aggressive charge/discharge cycles (normal use is probably better since the average state of charge is then lower). I've completely killed a battery in a few months when I made a habit of leaving my laptop on my bed turned on during most of the day, Now I either remove the battery or keep the laptop in sleep when it's not being used if it's being kept plugged in for extended periods.

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