I'm "building" my own laptop by getting a Motorola Lapdock and an MK802 PC-on-a-stick and glomming them together .. oila! Upgradeable laptop! :)
Building my Own Laptop
81–90 of 91 posts
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#82Incidentally, 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/
That was a great read. Thanks!
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#83It'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 wo…
You don't need that kind of gear to build a board like this. You just need a good set of EDA tools and to read all the datasheets carefully. Stuff like trace impedance and the performance of high-speed lines should be done in simulation tools before you ever send out the board to be fabbed. It's only in cases where people are really pushing the limits (networking gear, RF gear, for example) that high-speed physical measurement hardware is necessary.
A board like that, with a Spartan6 and ARM processor, is actually fairly easy to make work "out of the box" with minimal attention to pre-build simulation, as long as you carefully follow the datasheets' recommendations for signal routing, bypass, etc.
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#84I 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...]
A few friends and I were discussing at work how nice it would be to be able to make your own custom laptop or smart phone. Something pluggable where more than just RAM and HDD were swappable. One thing that came up, however, was what to do about "evolving" wireless standards. Well, what if you could get a completely open source software defined radio? Might be bloody expensive for the miniaturization, and it would have certain physical limits (due to antenna sizes mostly), but it might go a long way to solving the whole problem of having to "upgrade" your phone or laptop just to get higher connection speeds, or have NFC/Bluetooth 3/etc.
(the above are ramblings of a code monkey who dabbles in simulating RF; negative mutterings about how unrealistic or stupid the above ideas are will be politely ignored).
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#85Quad-Core GHz+ CPUs are "good enough" for every day code development? Seriously? We really do live in a world of bloatware if we need 4 cores to support an IDE or a classic editor + compiler/interpreter setup. This really reminds me of May's Law and that it needs to be addressed.
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Same experience here, i kept my laptop in a socket almost every day for 2 years only bringing it out maybe once a month. The battery was as good as new until i forgot it completely uncharged for 2 weeks when it overnight reduced its 2h capability into more like 2 minutes.
Oh yeah, that kills them pretty fast. I've had the same experience with my backup cellphone and mp3 player, had to buy new batteries.
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#87Analog battery meter? Why go through all this trouble, and then take a step-back by including some analog meter?
Or just glue this on the laptop: http://img.ehowcdn.com/article-new/ehow/images/a07/8f/qt/do-...
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same experience here, i kept my laptop in a socket almost every day for 2 years only bringing it out maybe once a month. The battery was as good as new until i forgot it completely uncharged for 2 weeks when it overnight reduced its 2h capability into more like 2 minutes.
Oh yeah, that kills them pretty fast. I've had the same experience with my backup cellphone and mp3 player, had to buy new batteries.
Hmm. Then maybe I'm ascribing my problem to the wrong behavior. I wonder whether I inadvertently left my problem children discharged for too long, at some point.
I've gotten reliable service out of my mobile phones, but laptop Li ion batteries continue to feel (for lack of a more consistent and rational/analytical approach, on my part) like black magic, to me.
Re: Building my Own Laptop
#89Re: Building my Own Laptop
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You use computers very differently than I do! What a lot of workarounds just to get a normal laptop experience.