11 ms·

Crowdfunding the Novena Open Laptop

292 points by kevs 12y ago

robbiet480 12y ago
For those that didn't instantly recognize the name, this is Bunnie Huang's open laptop he talked about previously [1] [1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena
Bluerise 12y ago
I have been waiting for some time for the crowdfunding campaign. The FreeScale i.MX6 platform is very versatile. Up to quad core 1.2GHz, SATA, PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet (limited to 480Mbps) and lots of good documentation and driver support. The only issue is the graphics blob and... in this case the price tag. I hoped I could afford it, but it looks like I can't. Still, there are lots of other community boards based on the i.MX6 SoC. If you don't need the laptop version or an FPGA, there are much cheaper boards out there. The Novena Open Laptop really is good work. I hope it'll get funded!
bmslieght 12y ago
The boards are a little out of my price range at the moment. But definitely wanted to support this project, so I have backed "Buy us a Beer" at $5.
mitosis 12y ago
Love at first sight. The only thing left is deciding whether to buy the desktop or the laptop version.
perlpimp 12y ago
this guy is pretty awesome, might be just the hack candy one might like to have if one is into hardware hacking. TL;DR: here is the video from a conference where bunnie and his friend hacked flash card controller, so you can see the qualities that the laptop will possess. http://youtu.be/r3GDPwIuRKI http://youtu.be/r3GDPwIuRKI
georgemcbay 12y ago
Having worked with bunnie and xobs at chumby, one thing I can vouch for is that they intimately understand the risks and challenges of actual real-world hardware production at scale. The fact that they went ahead with the crowdfunding on this is a really good indication that it will actually ship (if the goals are hit), and with a much higher probability of being on time than your average Kickstarter hardware project (where the people behind it usually have never had hands-on experience with actual production runs).
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  He's also been kicking the project around for years now, so he's probably thought/worked through a lot of the initial hurdles.
pasbesoin 12y ago
Thank you, bunnie, Xobs, et al., for listening to the interest that was expressed for what was a personal project and deciding in response to expand its scope (quite significantly), providing this momentum to open-source hardware and systems. (I don't know bunnie nor Xobs, but this is what I gather happened based upon reading occasionally about the project over the past some months.) From my perspective, bunnie provided a write-up of what he was up to, purely for the interest of those who cared to read. There was overwhelming response. If you care about open systems and hackability (in the classic sense), this is really worth looking into and hopefully supporting. (From my admittedly limited perspective.)
2close4comfort 12y ago
This is GREAT to see Novena make it to this step. A truly awesome amount of work by bunnie and xobs it exciting see them make this far!
InclinedPlane 12y ago
I'm happy to see some sane crowdfunding pricing on these reward tiers. So many projects have their reward pricing set similar to retail prices. That's fine if you've already done all the R&D work on the project and there's little risk, but if you actually need net funding from the project then you need a significant overhead on every reward. That said, I hope this is successful, these guys are consummate hardware hackers, it'll be neat to see what happens when they ship a project on this scale that ends up in a lot of people's hands.
- jff 12y ago
  They sure made it sound liked the crowdfunded prices were cheaper than retail: "We are offering four variations, and at the conclusion of the Crowd Supply campaign on May 18, all the prices listed below will go up by 10%"
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    I read that as the post-campaign follow-on pre-orders which tend to be fairly standard these days.
wicket 12y ago
I'm always interested in open hardware but I'm a bit baffled by the choices that are available: Just the board: This is perhaps the most appealing option but I would want a case with it, I'm not interested in building my own case. Why would I want a 4GB microSD with that? I'll buy my own with a decent capacity/class or even an SSD. All-in-One Desktop: $700 more than board for a case and LCD? The design of the flip-top LCD doesn't make a lot of sense - you lose a lot of desk space and the board is going to collect dust. It's not very portable due to the lack of a battery, controller board, keyboard and mouse so I might as well just plug it into my monitor. Laptop: $800 more than the desktop option for a battery, controller board and SSD. Seems a little expensive and again still not very portable. I'm not sure you can call it a laptop without a keyboard or pointing device. Heirloom Laptop: $3000 more than the "Laptop" for what is now actually a laptop that includes a keyboard and pointing stick with a wooden case. Wood is quite heavy so it's not exactly the ideal material for a portable device.
- mmastrac 12y ago
  My guess is that he's sourced an incredibly cheap batch of 4GB cards from China. It likely adds very little in terms of cost, but gives much more value to the end-user in being able to just boot it up and have it work.
  - storborg 12y ago
    You are correct, the 4GB SD card is mostly about having a quick start ready-to-roll image.
    - joezydeco 12y ago
      Bootstrapping SoCs gets really tricky when you don't have a JTAG device. The newer chips that let you boot directly from SD have been a great leap forward in development speed.
      - npsimons 12y ago
        So wish I could upvote you multiple times. People these days are spoiled with their precompiled ROMs and precompiled software that runs on mainstream desktops to load those ROMs over universal standards (USB). Even with JTAG embedded programming was a PITA.
tmp1298371 12y ago
At 2:15 in the video, the screen behind his head flashes a loop of the string "Y3Jvd2RzdXBwbHkuY29tL25vdmVuYS1wdXp6bGU=". When run through a Base64 decoder, it outputs "crowdsupply.com/novena-puzzle". It would appear as though we've got an ARG on our hands.
badataccounting 12y ago
Great idea really I wish them success!! but why are they using the keyboard from a Thinkpad.They are the most infuriating keyboards ever as the fn key is on the bottom left side with Ctrl one key in one. Even Lenovo's come with a switch in the BIOS to undo this. Before anyone says this is the actual format of the qwerty keyboard the overwhelming majority of people are used to it with Ctrl on the bottom left so just leave it
- mitosis 12y ago
  I'm not so sure the majority of developers / hackers (the target market for this device) are used to Ctrl on the bottom left. I know several (myself included) who remap their keyboard so it sits left of "A".
- rwolf 12y ago
  Thinkpad keyboard only appears to come with $5,000 limited-run version, and it's detachable. Every other version explicitly does not come with a keyboard because of how little consensus there is.
mmastrac 12y ago
Oh yeah. I've had my eye on this for ages. It comes with an FPGA!
- dang 12y ago
  If Matt says it's good, then it's good.
akkartik 12y ago
It is totally understandable -- and totally disappointing -- that this custom work of art in hardware comes with regular, bloated, unhackable linux. One can dream..
- mmagin 12y ago
  "unhackable linux"? What?
  - akkartik 12y ago
    I suppose I should elaborate on where I'm coming from. 1. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 2. https://plus.google.com/110440139189906861022/posts/EKhGyqn1gTk https://plus.google.com/110440139189906861022/posts/EKhGyqn1... (including comments) Don't get me wrong, I use linux everyday and it's better than the alternatives out there. But seeing a blue-sky bespoke attempt like this gets me wanting more.
    - pjc50 12y ago
      The first paper is (a) complaining about FreeBSD and (b) he hasn't seen how bad most commercial software is on the source side. The second is about suspend; while I somewhat agree on not liking high integration (dbus, high-complexity desktops), suspend has been a total nightmare largely due to hardware manufacturers. You need to do very specific things or the display doesn't come back cleanly.
      - Sanddancer 12y ago
        The first paper is not complaining about FreeBSD, it's complaining about open source software in general, using the FreeBSD ports tree as an example. All of the software examples given are equally valid for Linux -- libtool and all its ugliness is still required, a lot of intermediary libraries are thrown out in the end result -- and the lessons are still unlearned. The mess of OSS begat ALSA, obstinate kernel developers refusing to do the right thing with ALSA begat PulseAudio, etc. Yes, commercial software sucks, but that does not excuse just how much of an unholy mess open source software is.
jff 12y ago
Some interesting choices, some incredibly disappointing. A9 core rather than the virtualization-ready A15? (I'd rather have a 64-bit ARM but those are still a ways out) Edit: and let's not hear about how closed A15 is blah blah. At the end of the day, something is closed. Did Freescale give you silicon masks? Guess it's not totally open after all. Single SO-DIMM means max 8GB of RAM, but of course since you're running a 32-bit chip you'll be restricted past 4GB anyway. 100 Mbit Ethernet in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Fourteen? Edit: Several people have pointed out that, thankfully, the 100Mbit port is a secondary port, while the main one is Gbit. This is actually pretty cool. The case is actually kind of cool, but you can't really call it a laptop if your footprint is normal laptop size + a separate keyboard. Nobody's lap is that big. I think it could be pretty usable for work while on travel but you can't use it on an airplane tray table. And then the pricing. Oh my the pricing. $700 for a case and a screen. Another $700 for an RC car battery and an SSD. Not even Apple marks up SSDs and batteries that much. I would really love to get the laptop spec one for $800-1000--you know, the price of a great desktop PC plus a monitor. Sure, the ARM processor is going to be disappointingly sluggish and I'll be beating my head against the 4GB memory ceiling within an hour, but it looks really damn cool and the screen size is acceptable. Kickstarter-type things are often done as "backers pay more for a unit, but they get it first and they're willing to pay because they believe in the product". However, the prices will go UP by 10% after this campaign is over! So the $2000 "laptop" will now cost $2200, despite the reduction in component cost due to time and scaling. Edit: oh, and apparently the case, which I think is one of the cooler parts of this project, doesn't seem to be open? So I can't pay a fabricator $200 to make one, then slap a $400 A15 board in there. The totally open laptop, ladies and gentlemen!
- akiselev 12y ago
  I know Bunnie as an incredible hardware engineer with a lot of experience across the entire process of getting a product from design to manufacture. I'm sure the decisions were made for very good reason. Freescale has extensive open source board support packages for several flavors of Linux and Android. With the exception of the TI's OMAP5, all of the A15 implementations I know of are under lock and NDA and even though Bunnie could source them, the documentation and software support packages would not be as easy and would require working closely with the manufacture to get them. I have no idea about OMAP5 as I haven't even seen one in production. Most mobile ARM processors AFAIK do not support gigabit ethernet yet, save a few Marvell SoCs (less for mobile and more for other embedded). Smartphones designed with modern ARM processors require teams of 2 dozen engineers working their asses off for months to make a single revision, and this is when they're partners with the chip manufacturers (ala Google, Apple, or Samsung). Bunnie is working with a much smaller team and with different constraints. Any board like this is going to be expensive to manufacture and assemble. Even if he were to do a run of 100 units at a time, the overhead of assembly and part purchases in such low quantities are likely to run $100+ a unit. Combine with the extra support costs of including an FPGA in there, and it's not unreasonable to charge so much for such a niche, low quantity product. Edit: Also Freescale is on the low end of the high end ARM market and they know it. I wouldn't be surprise if Bunnie got some extra help from them during integration.
ibotty 12y ago
i'd really like to get the main board _and_ the battery board, but no display (wrong size) and no case (wrong size). i'd like to use a modded thinkpad x-series case (and keyboard) and install a better display and board!
bbarn 12y ago
Why use (and advertise) "High Modulus Epoxy" as the bonding agent for the wood version? High Modulus means stiff, and unbending - i.e., crack instead of bend, and in bonding wood to aluminum, a lower modulus resin would be better for this case, as it would flex when stressed and not cause a snap-off delamination?
- jff 12y ago
  Two possibilities: 1. The guy who designed the wood version is experienced in bonding wood to aluminium and has good reason for using high modulus epoxy. 2. "High Modulus" sounds really good, let's say that! Nobody wants "low modulus epoxy", whatever that is!
johansch 12y ago
How about finishing some projects before starting new ones? I'm thinking of e.g. NeTV http://www.adafruit.com/products/609 http://www.adafruit.com/products/609 http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
- X-Cubed 12y ago
  What's unfinished about the NeTV? You can buy the kit and download the source code and do want you want with it.
ParadisoShlee 12y ago
Like the Open Pandora (I still use every second day) or Openmoko (paperweight), I'll happily put my money forward supporting open hardware. Congratulations Bunnie/xob/others on the release of the crowdfund. This is stage one. Community, hackability and continuous development cycles will lead to better, more feature packed and stable devices. The CPU was a good choice for performance/power/openness but there is nothing stopping them from using a modular design for the SOC and people could replace them as required.. the www.pyra-handheld.com/ is build on that idea. I'm looking forward to the use cases for the laptop... Side question: Is there much in the way of design that can be done to improve the physical security to this design? or are we hoping that people simply don't have the driveby ability to mess with this due to the fringe-ness? and physical access is physical access.
muyuu 12y ago
Very curious about the capabilities of that FPGA in combination with the rest of the hardware, and the high-speed expansion port.
sneak 12y ago
Open laptop because we're worried about state-sponsored attackers expending multiple millions of dollars of time and resources to undertake the lowest level of attacks upon our hardware. Top model ships with a keyboard with a radio transceiver built in.
- dfc 12y ago
  Defending against an APT is not the only use case for the machine. More importantly you singled out the top of the line model for your complaint. For that much money it better come with keyboard. Worried about APT? Save thousands and build your own ergodox to use with the novena.
zmanian 12y ago
What are the use cases for the FPGA realistically? Then only piece of easily downloaded and installed code is a SHA based crytocoin miner.
- cbsmith 12y ago
  Actually pretty handy for doing optimized NIC/protocol processing. Particularly handy for wireless stuff IIRC. It's about as close as you can get to a software defined CPU, so the options are kind of limitless.
- storborg 12y ago
  Just to toss out a few ideas: software defined radio, high-throughput DSP (like audio processing or machine vision), MITMing of fast protocols, packet inspection, CPU emulation.
  - zmanian 12y ago
    I found http://opencores.org/projects http://opencores.org/projects nothing is a killer app right now. At work I use an FPGA as async real time controller. Not sure what utility that would have if not connected to specialized hardware.
- zurn 12y ago
  Learning & prototyping hardware (ASIC) design. Applications that like low latency I/O. You can respond in microseconds with real time guarantees, eg for radio link layer protocols.
axx 12y ago
A little off-topic, but they gave a nice talk about SD Card exploitation at the 30C3 in germany: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo
- jmpe 12y ago
  Not really off-topic: at 42:00 the setup shows a Novena prototype. They used a binder as case.
contulluipeste 12y ago
"Novena is a 1.2GHz, Freescale quad-core ARM architecture computer" That's a disappointing choice! Why not something more like LEON or OpenRISC?
fest 12y ago
Somebody please make a device which is more accessible (pricewise), and can be used to prototype/interface with common digital protocols (i2c, uart's, spi, CAN, ethernet, USB). I'd imagine it could be a mashup of SBC (Beagle, Olimex's LIME, heck, even RaspberryPi) and Bus Pirate. Add a screen and battery, and call it a day. I don't think a device like this should have the fastest CPU and plenty of RAM (that wouldn't hurt of course).

292 points by kevs 12y ago

For those that didn't instantly recognize the name, this is Bunnie Huang's open laptop he talked about previously [1] [1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena

Bluerise 12y ago

I have been waiting for some time for the crowdfunding campaign. The FreeScale i.MX6 platform is very versatile. Up to quad core 1.2GHz, SATA, PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet (limited to 480Mbps) and lots of good documentation and driver support. The only issue is the graphics blob and... in this case the price tag. I hoped I could afford it, but it looks like I can't. Still, there are lots of other community boards based on the i.MX6 SoC. If you don't need the laptop version or an FPGA, there are much cheaper boards out there. The Novena Open Laptop really is good work. I hope it'll get funded!

bmslieght 12y ago

The boards are a little out of my price range at the moment. But definitely wanted to support this project, so I have backed "Buy us a Beer" at $5.

mitosis 12y ago

Love at first sight. The only thing left is deciding whether to buy the desktop or the laptop version.

perlpimp 12y ago

this guy is pretty awesome, might be just the hack candy one might like to have if one is into hardware hacking. TL;DR: here is the video from a conference where bunnie and his friend hacked flash card controller, so you can see the qualities that the laptop will possess. http://youtu.be/r3GDPwIuRKI http://youtu.be/r3GDPwIuRKI

georgemcbay 12y ago

Having worked with bunnie and xobs at chumby, one thing I can vouch for is that they intimately understand the risks and challenges of actual real-world hardware production at scale. The fact that they went ahead with the crowdfunding on this is a really good indication that it will actually ship (if the goals are hit), and with a much higher probability of being on time than your average Kickstarter hardware project (where the people behind it usually have never had hands-on experience with actual production runs).

sliverstorm 12y ago
He's also been kicking the project around for years now, so he's probably thought/worked through a lot of the initial hurdles.

pasbesoin 12y ago

Thank you, bunnie, Xobs, et al., for listening to the interest that was expressed for what was a personal project and deciding in response to expand its scope (quite significantly), providing this momentum to open-source hardware and systems. (I don't know bunnie nor Xobs, but this is what I gather happened based upon reading occasionally about the project over the past some months.) From my perspective, bunnie provided a write-up of what he was up to, purely for the interest of those who cared to read. There was overwhelming response. If you care about open systems and hackability (in the classic sense), this is really worth looking into and hopefully supporting. (From my admittedly limited perspective.)

2close4comfort 12y ago

This is GREAT to see Novena make it to this step. A truly awesome amount of work by bunnie and xobs it exciting see them make this far!

InclinedPlane 12y ago

I'm happy to see some sane crowdfunding pricing on these reward tiers. So many projects have their reward pricing set similar to retail prices. That's fine if you've already done all the R&D work on the project and there's little risk, but if you actually need net funding from the project then you need a significant overhead on every reward. That said, I hope this is successful, these guys are consummate hardware hackers, it'll be neat to see what happens when they ship a project on this scale that ends up in a lot of people's hands.

jff 12y ago
They sure made it sound liked the crowdfunded prices were cheaper than retail: "We are offering four variations, and at the conclusion of the Crowd Supply campaign on May 18, all the prices listed below will go up by 10%"
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  I read that as the post-campaign follow-on pre-orders which tend to be fairly standard these days.

wicket 12y ago

I'm always interested in open hardware but I'm a bit baffled by the choices that are available: Just the board: This is perhaps the most appealing option but I would want a case with it, I'm not interested in building my own case. Why would I want a 4GB microSD with that? I'll buy my own with a decent capacity/class or even an SSD. All-in-One Desktop: $700 more than board for a case and LCD? The design of the flip-top LCD doesn't make a lot of sense - you lose a lot of desk space and the board is going to collect dust. It's not very portable due to the lack of a battery, controller board, keyboard and mouse so I might as well just plug it into my monitor. Laptop: $800 more than the desktop option for a battery, controller board and SSD. Seems a little expensive and again still not very portable. I'm not sure you can call it a laptop without a keyboard or pointing device. Heirloom Laptop: $3000 more than the "Laptop" for what is now actually a laptop that includes a keyboard and pointing stick with a wooden case. Wood is quite heavy so it's not exactly the ideal material for a portable device.

mmastrac 12y ago
My guess is that he's sourced an incredibly cheap batch of 4GB cards from China. It likely adds very little in terms of cost, but gives much more value to the end-user in being able to just boot it up and have it work.
- storborg 12y ago
  You are correct, the 4GB SD card is mostly about having a quick start ready-to-roll image.
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    Bootstrapping SoCs gets really tricky when you don't have a JTAG device. The newer chips that let you boot directly from SD have been a great leap forward in development speed.
    - npsimons 12y ago
      So wish I could upvote you multiple times. People these days are spoiled with their precompiled ROMs and precompiled software that runs on mainstream desktops to load those ROMs over universal standards (USB). Even with JTAG embedded programming was a PITA.

tmp1298371 12y ago

At 2:15 in the video, the screen behind his head flashes a loop of the string "Y3Jvd2RzdXBwbHkuY29tL25vdmVuYS1wdXp6bGU=". When run through a Base64 decoder, it outputs "crowdsupply.com/novena-puzzle". It would appear as though we've got an ARG on our hands.

badataccounting 12y ago

Great idea really I wish them success!! but why are they using the keyboard from a Thinkpad.They are the most infuriating keyboards ever as the fn key is on the bottom left side with Ctrl one key in one. Even Lenovo's come with a switch in the BIOS to undo this. Before anyone says this is the actual format of the qwerty keyboard the overwhelming majority of people are used to it with Ctrl on the bottom left so just leave it

mitosis 12y ago
I'm not so sure the majority of developers / hackers (the target market for this device) are used to Ctrl on the bottom left. I know several (myself included) who remap their keyboard so it sits left of "A".
rwolf 12y ago
Thinkpad keyboard only appears to come with $5,000 limited-run version, and it's detachable. Every other version explicitly does not come with a keyboard because of how little consensus there is.

mmastrac 12y ago

Oh yeah. I've had my eye on this for ages. It comes with an FPGA!

dang 12y ago
If Matt says it's good, then it's good.

akkartik 12y ago

It is totally understandable -- and totally disappointing -- that this custom work of art in hardware comes with regular, bloated, unhackable linux. One can dream..

mmagin 12y ago
"unhackable linux"? What?
- akkartik 12y ago
  I suppose I should elaborate on where I'm coming from. 1. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 2. https://plus.google.com/110440139189906861022/posts/EKhGyqn1gTk https://plus.google.com/110440139189906861022/posts/EKhGyqn1... (including comments) Don't get me wrong, I use linux everyday and it's better than the alternatives out there. But seeing a blue-sky bespoke attempt like this gets me wanting more.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    The first paper is (a) complaining about FreeBSD and (b) he hasn't seen how bad most commercial software is on the source side. The second is about suspend; while I somewhat agree on not liking high integration (dbus, high-complexity desktops), suspend has been a total nightmare largely due to hardware manufacturers. You need to do very specific things or the display doesn't come back cleanly.
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      The first paper is not complaining about FreeBSD, it's complaining about open source software in general, using the FreeBSD ports tree as an example. All of the software examples given are equally valid for Linux -- libtool and all its ugliness is still required, a lot of intermediary libraries are thrown out in the end result -- and the lessons are still unlearned. The mess of OSS begat ALSA, obstinate kernel developers refusing to do the right thing with ALSA begat PulseAudio, etc. Yes, commercial software sucks, but that does not excuse just how much of an unholy mess open source software is.

jff 12y ago

Some interesting choices, some incredibly disappointing. A9 core rather than the virtualization-ready A15? (I'd rather have a 64-bit ARM but those are still a ways out) Edit: and let's not hear about how closed A15 is blah blah. At the end of the day, something is closed. Did Freescale give you silicon masks? Guess it's not totally open after all. Single SO-DIMM means max 8GB of RAM, but of course since you're running a 32-bit chip you'll be restricted past 4GB anyway. 100 Mbit Ethernet in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Fourteen? Edit: Several people have pointed out that, thankfully, the 100Mbit port is a secondary port, while the main one is Gbit. This is actually pretty cool. The case is actually kind of cool, but you can't really call it a laptop if your footprint is normal laptop size + a separate keyboard. Nobody's lap is that big. I think it could be pretty usable for work while on travel but you can't use it on an airplane tray table. And then the pricing. Oh my the pricing. $700 for a case and a screen. Another $700 for an RC car battery and an SSD. Not even Apple marks up SSDs and batteries that much. I would really love to get the laptop spec one for $800-1000--you know, the price of a great desktop PC plus a monitor. Sure, the ARM processor is going to be disappointingly sluggish and I'll be beating my head against the 4GB memory ceiling within an hour, but it looks really damn cool and the screen size is acceptable. Kickstarter-type things are often done as "backers pay more for a unit, but they get it first and they're willing to pay because they believe in the product". However, the prices will go UP by 10% after this campaign is over! So the $2000 "laptop" will now cost $2200, despite the reduction in component cost due to time and scaling. Edit: oh, and apparently the case, which I think is one of the cooler parts of this project, doesn't seem to be open? So I can't pay a fabricator $200 to make one, then slap a $400 A15 board in there. The totally open laptop, ladies and gentlemen!

akiselev 12y ago
I know Bunnie as an incredible hardware engineer with a lot of experience across the entire process of getting a product from design to manufacture. I'm sure the decisions were made for very good reason. Freescale has extensive open source board support packages for several flavors of Linux and Android. With the exception of the TI's OMAP5, all of the A15 implementations I know of are under lock and NDA and even though Bunnie could source them, the documentation and software support packages would not be as easy and would require working closely with the manufacture to get them. I have no idea about OMAP5 as I haven't even seen one in production. Most mobile ARM processors AFAIK do not support gigabit ethernet yet, save a few Marvell SoCs (less for mobile and more for other embedded). Smartphones designed with modern ARM processors require teams of 2 dozen engineers working their asses off for months to make a single revision, and this is when they're partners with the chip manufacturers (ala Google, Apple, or Samsung). Bunnie is working with a much smaller team and with different constraints. Any board like this is going to be expensive to manufacture and assemble. Even if he were to do a run of 100 units at a time, the overhead of assembly and part purchases in such low quantities are likely to run $100+ a unit. Combine with the extra support costs of including an FPGA in there, and it's not unreasonable to charge so much for such a niche, low quantity product. Edit: Also Freescale is on the low end of the high end ARM market and they know it. I wouldn't be surprise if Bunnie got some extra help from them during integration.

ibotty 12y ago

i'd really like to get the main board _and_ the battery board, but no display (wrong size) and no case (wrong size). i'd like to use a modded thinkpad x-series case (and keyboard) and install a better display and board!

bbarn 12y ago

Why use (and advertise) "High Modulus Epoxy" as the bonding agent for the wood version? High Modulus means stiff, and unbending - i.e., crack instead of bend, and in bonding wood to aluminum, a lower modulus resin would be better for this case, as it would flex when stressed and not cause a snap-off delamination?

jff 12y ago
Two possibilities: 1. The guy who designed the wood version is experienced in bonding wood to aluminium and has good reason for using high modulus epoxy. 2. "High Modulus" sounds really good, let's say that! Nobody wants "low modulus epoxy", whatever that is!

johansch 12y ago

How about finishing some projects before starting new ones? I'm thinking of e.g. NeTV http://www.adafruit.com/products/609 http://www.adafruit.com/products/609 http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

X-Cubed 12y ago
What's unfinished about the NeTV? You can buy the kit and download the source code and do want you want with it.

ParadisoShlee 12y ago

Like the Open Pandora (I still use every second day) or Openmoko (paperweight), I'll happily put my money forward supporting open hardware. Congratulations Bunnie/xob/others on the release of the crowdfund. This is stage one. Community, hackability and continuous development cycles will lead to better, more feature packed and stable devices. The CPU was a good choice for performance/power/openness but there is nothing stopping them from using a modular design for the SOC and people could replace them as required.. the www.pyra-handheld.com/ is build on that idea. I'm looking forward to the use cases for the laptop... Side question: Is there much in the way of design that can be done to improve the physical security to this design? or are we hoping that people simply don't have the driveby ability to mess with this due to the fringe-ness? and physical access is physical access.

muyuu 12y ago

Very curious about the capabilities of that FPGA in combination with the rest of the hardware, and the high-speed expansion port.

sneak 12y ago

Open laptop because we're worried about state-sponsored attackers expending multiple millions of dollars of time and resources to undertake the lowest level of attacks upon our hardware. Top model ships with a keyboard with a radio transceiver built in.

dfc 12y ago
Defending against an APT is not the only use case for the machine. More importantly you singled out the top of the line model for your complaint. For that much money it better come with keyboard. Worried about APT? Save thousands and build your own ergodox to use with the novena.

zmanian 12y ago

What are the use cases for the FPGA realistically? Then only piece of easily downloaded and installed code is a SHA based crytocoin miner.

cbsmith 12y ago
Actually pretty handy for doing optimized NIC/protocol processing. Particularly handy for wireless stuff IIRC. It's about as close as you can get to a software defined CPU, so the options are kind of limitless.
storborg 12y ago
Just to toss out a few ideas: software defined radio, high-throughput DSP (like audio processing or machine vision), MITMing of fast protocols, packet inspection, CPU emulation.
- zmanian 12y ago
  I found http://opencores.org/projects http://opencores.org/projects nothing is a killer app right now. At work I use an FPGA as async real time controller. Not sure what utility that would have if not connected to specialized hardware.
zurn 12y ago
Learning & prototyping hardware (ASIC) design. Applications that like low latency I/O. You can respond in microseconds with real time guarantees, eg for radio link layer protocols.

axx 12y ago

A little off-topic, but they gave a nice talk about SD Card exploitation at the 30C3 in germany: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo

jmpe 12y ago
Not really off-topic: at 42:00 the setup shows a Novena prototype. They used a binder as case.

contulluipeste 12y ago

"Novena is a 1.2GHz, Freescale quad-core ARM architecture computer" That's a disappointing choice! Why not something more like LEON or OpenRISC?

fest 12y ago

Somebody please make a device which is more accessible (pricewise), and can be used to prototype/interface with common digital protocols (i2c, uart's, spi, CAN, ethernet, USB). I'd imagine it could be a mashup of SBC (Beagle, Olimex's LIME, heck, even RaspberryPi) and Bus Pirate. Add a screen and battery, and call it a day. I don't think a device like this should have the fastest CPU and plenty of RAM (that wouldn't hurt of course).