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DIY Laptop 64 bit ARM
- akhilcacharya 11y agoI'm intrigued by ARM machines in general. I want to see where this goes.
- Zekio 11y agoThis looks very promising as a laptop that could be upgrade-able like a desktop PC. Hope to see more about this :)
- FussyZeus 11y agoSeems a little backwards to me to design your case and then design the motherboard to fit inside it, but I've never built any laptops so I'll just watch and see where this goes.
- mafuyu 11y agoThis is Olimex's blog, and they design and sell dev boards, so it makes some kind of sense to leave the part that you have full control over to the end, I suppose.
- fredsir 11y agoThe proper way would be to build all parts to fit each other, so you got everything done properly. I imagine that is how Apple does their things anyways.
- emeraldd 11y agoYou have to start somewhere to be able to set your constraints. If you already know how the hardware works and what will be required there. It makes sense to do a gross estimate for the enclosure and design a board to fit.
- caboteria 11y agoTooling for injection molded plastic is very expensive so for small-volume runs like this one it's likely cheaper and quicker to get off-the-shelf plastic.
- ant6n 11y agoI'd really like to see a laptop built on Nvidias X1. Maybe projects like this will push ARM on laptops?
- gozo 11y agoHardware isn't the problem and hasn't been for some time, software is. Partly because Android is Linux for chip manufacturers. Once there is something software wise that enough people want to buy and use the hardware itself is, at least somewhat, straight forward.
- ant6n 11y agoWell, Chromebooks do linux, sort of. And they are pretty fast, sort of. It would be have to have a hardware that's faster and supports full OpenGl. Nvidia does have their linux for Tegra thing. But yeah, better software would definitely be nice, too.
- edwintorok 11y agoThere are a few other ARM laptop projects that are interesting to watch as well: http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/laptop_15in/news/ http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/laptop_15in/news/ http://wiki.vero-apparatus.com/ARM64OpenLaptopConcept http://wiki.vero-apparatus.com/ARM64OpenLaptopConcept I hope that it will be possible to boot stock Debian on them without the need for binary blob drivers or userspace programs.
- jacquesm 11y agoI can see the reasoning behind the binary blob drivers but what's your reason for not liking userspace programs?
- antoinealb 11y agoI think he means binary userspace programs.
- edwintorok 11y agoYes
- dublinben 11y agoThe Asus C201 with Libreboot[1] should come very close to meeting your requirements. There is still some progress to be made on the GPU driver, but it's a usable system. [1] http://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/c201.html http://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/c201.html
- edwintorok 11y agoThanks, how is the situation with the GPU on that device? Open source kernel&2D drivers, and binary blob for 3D driver?
- nextos 11y agoSadly yes. Mali is half finished, but it stalled. However, with 2D drivers things are quite OK. This is a humble machine, so 3D acceleration is not that useful.
- deutronium 11y agoSounds interesting! Does anyone know anything about how much it might end up costing.
- vinceguidry 11y agoWhen I have kids, something like this is going to be their only hardware until they're around 15 or so.
- ant6n 11y agoWould you mind elaborating on your reasoning?
- vinceguidry 11y agoWhen I was in grade school, I started reading library books, and gravitated towards the programming books. They were mostly BASIC on Apple IIe hardware. I used BASIC on whatever hardware I could get my hands on, and my mom bought me a calculator that had a BASIC interpreter. Even once we got a PC, its capabilities were sub-par. I didn't get a machine that reflected the state of the art until I built one myself in the late nineties. Having severely-limited hardware made me invest lots and lots of time into figuring out how it worked. I would like to pass that experience on to my kids, so they can be masters of their own technology world instead of passive consumers of other peoples'. Did you screw up your machine? Do you know how to re-install the OS? Here's a printout of the page that tells you how. Have data you didn't back up? Well, here's a protip, you can mount the hard disk on another machine, maybe your sister will let you use hers.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- asteli 11y agoI had the same experience. With the Apple II machines, you could simply turn them on and punch BASIC into them straight away, which in retrospect, I think is a fantastic way to be introduced to programming.
- brusch64 11y agoI did the same with the C64. Another big advantage was: if it didn't work you just had to reset it and everything was fine (OS in ROM). My brother let me tinker with his C64 (when I was about 10 years old) and that started my career in programming.
- satai 11y agoCortex A53? Nice toy but A57 or A72 would make much more sense in laptop form factor.
- rwmj 11y agoA53s are the low power (& low performance) 64 bit ARM cores. They are sort of equivalent to the 32 bit A7. A57 is sort of equivalent to the A15 - high power and high performance, so not quite so useful for laptops. Having said all that: - I have a Samsung Chromebook 2012 which is dual A15. It still has great battery life. - What's really going to be interesting are laptops based around the 64 bit big.LITTLE, for example the Snapdragon (either dual or quad A57 + quad A53), where, if the kernel is smart enough, you can trade battery life for performance depending on what the user is doing.
- Zekio 11y ago- What's really going to be interesting are laptops based around the 64 bit big.LITTLE, for example the Snapdragon (either dual or quad A57 + quad A53), where, if the kernel is smart enough, you can trade battery life for performance depending on what the user is doing. Now this would be very interesting indeed!
- lfam 11y agoThe cool thing about Olimex is that their hardware designs are open-source, so anyone could make a compatible motherboard with the faster chips.
- RIMR 11y agoHow can this thing be 64-bit ARM when it doesn't even have a motherboard or processor?
- dcw303 11y agoThis is great, I love the idea of building a complete laptop from the ground up to dispel all the "magic" that goes on inside a manufacturer built consumer model. Hypothetically speaking, if I was a super-paranoid type who wanted to build my own laptop from scratch so that I trusted every component installed, how would I go about verifying the CPU / SOC was not a threat? I guess I'm asking if there's anything equivalent to an MD5 checksum for hardware? It seems that backdoors are being discovered in parts as esoteric as hard drive controller firmware, so I'm wondering if it's practical to believe I could build a personal computing device that is trustworthy.
- verbify 11y agoAccording to Ken Thompson's lecture at his Turing Award, you can't: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp... Practically speaking, you can verify that it's unlikely that there is no backdoor, but it'd take a fair bit of effort.
- zachrose 11y agoImpractically speaking, you could singlehandedly reimplement decades of computer engineering starting with a pencil, paper, and a bucket of sand.
- stcredzero 11y agoFrom NAND to Tetris in 12 steps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlPj5Rg1y2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlPj5Rg1y2w
- ender89 11y agoI prefer placing rocks in an infinite desert to simulate the the flow of data through a computer myself.
- zymhan 11y agoThe best you can do is use a processor with an open-source design. Stallman used a MIPS CPU like this for a while.
- jackbravo 11y agoThis seems pretty similar to pi-top: - https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pi-top-a-raspberry-pi-laptop-you-build-yourself#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pi-top-a-raspberry-pi-lap...
- tetheno 11y agoThe problem is the keyboards. I fancy the concept of having a small ARM laptop, but I'm too accustomed to Thinkpad's and mechanical keyboards. Something like a Thinkpad 701C or the Zeos Pocket PC would be my dream for a portable note taking device.
- Wingman4l7 11y agoAren't both of those just robust rubber domes with scissor switches? The quality of portable Bluetooth keyboards with those specs have steadily improved.
- detaro 11y agoYou probably could get a spare-part Thinkpad keyboard to work somehow, if it doesn't already speak USB internally.
- Wingman4l7 11y agoIf you're looking for a portable Thinkpad-quality keyboard, the closest thing you're going to get was ironically originally made for Pocket PCs years ago -- it's a 4-segment folding keyboard, the design of which appears to have been updated to work with Bluetooth and is now selling as the ludicrously overpriced "Amigo 2.0" or the Chinese-branded GK 308.
- bfrog 11y agoI'd get one in a heartbeat if it had a full hd screen and an old thinkpad like keyboard with a nub. Seriously, ready to give up on the wintel boxes as of yesterday.