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Building my Own Laptop

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Re: Building my Own Laptop

#61

Post by lsc »

guylhem wrote: post #57
lsc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In early highschool, I carried around one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radio_Shack_TRS-80_Model_1... Which seems to me like the best form factor you can have if you can't have a flip-up monitor.

Yes, that's exactly the point! Just replace the logo by a breadboard internally linked to the various I/Os and I'm sold!!

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2008/7/27/162751/063

I don't know if he ever finished.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#62

Post by SquareWheel »

unimpressive wrote: post #59
SquareWheel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only on Hacker News.

What has wrong with that comment?

Nothing at all. But I can't think of any other community where we'd get into a discussion of the build process of a lightsaber, can you? I love participating in such a geeky crowd, even though I was never a big Star Wars guy myself.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#64

Post by Zak »

I've been looking for a laptop-appropriate ARM board that takes DIMMs for quite some time, as all the SOCs are very tight on RAM. Designing a motherboard is a bit beyond what I know how to do, but I really want to build a laptop with a custom composite shell, an ARM CPU, a high-res 4:3 screen and lots of battery.

I hope it gets updated to a Cortex A15 CPU.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#65

Post by robomartin »

Unless things changed in the last few years HDMI requires a non-trivial license fee of $5,000 to $15,000, if I remember correctly. There's also a per-unit fee. If you are not a signatory of the contract you can't buy HDMI chips.

How are they getting around that?

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#66

Post by haldean »

robomartin wrote: post #65

Unless things changed in the last few years HDMI requires a non-trivial license fee of $5,000 to $15,000, if I remember correctly. There's also a per-unit fee. If you are not a signatory of the contract you can't buy HDMI chips. How are they getting around that?

Yup, $10k/year and $.15/unit. It doesn't look like it's mandatory, though; the language on the site[0] is really hard to decipher. I imagine that they're not going to prosecute one guy for using a chip in his personal build. Obviously the Raspberry Pi guys are getting around this somehow, though; I'd be curious to know how.

[0]: http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/adopter_registration.aspx

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#67

Post by haldean »

SquareWheel wrote: post #43
andrewflnr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or reddit or RPF or 4chan or board game night or Comic Con or...

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#68

Post by stevewillows »

georgemcbay wrote: post #14
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

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).

The chumby was sort of a precursor to the tablet life most of us live now. It's sad that it failed, but the concept of chumby no doubt influenced a lot of really handy app design.

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#69

Post by marshray »

w1ntermute wrote: post #45
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/

Wow. I get the feeling he's kinda into hardware!

Re: Building my Own Laptop

#70

Post by jrockway »

robomartin wrote: post #65

Unless things changed in the last few years HDMI requires a non-trivial license fee of $5,000 to $15,000, if I remember correctly. There's also a per-unit fee. If you are not a signatory of the contract you can't buy HDMI chips. How are they getting around that?

This is pure speculation, but my guess is that signal spec licensing sits on shaky legal ground and that the big manufacturers are more than happy to pay up to avoid fighting a lawsuit that they may or may not win. Similarly, those that own the IP for the HDMI spec are unwilling to sue a small fish like the Raspberry Pi foundation, because even if they win, there's not much money to be made. And if they lose, then Samsung and Apple and Dell will realize they don't have to pay anymore, which would amount to a lot of money.

DisplayPort is a free spec and can be easily converted to HDMI, so I don't really understand why anyone uses HDMI. HDMI has more bullet points but I've never seen a device that can do anything more than deal with audio and video through the same cable. And Display Port does that fine.

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