
Ask HN: Make your own laptop, how complex is it? - siscia
Hello folks,<p>motivated by the lack of available laptops that I like in the market I am considering the idea of building my own.<p>Any of you have ever tried? What are the steps?<p>It seems like this is just an awful bad and expensive idea, but I would like to tap on your experience for confirming this.<p>At the moment I have tons of open questions.<p>The thing that I don&#x27;t like the most about today laptops is the cover (the case, the metal&#x2F;plastic thing around it), I want a screen without any chrome and with just enough space for the webcam below the screen.<p>Then the keyboard, I want long running keys, with proper T-shaped arrows.<p>Then a standard track pad.<p>Then a lot of ports, USB and HDMI.<p>Given the desiderata I would need to either source and buy the cover or to design it myself (?).<p>Then, the internals.<p>The motherboard need to fit the cover above, but who make motherboards? Do I need to look somewhere in China? Do I need to design my own? Or maybe I can design  the cover to fit a reasonably standard (successful) motherboard?<p>The battery, I don&#x27;t even know where to start... I guess those are somehow standard... Any ideas? What the about the converted?<p>The screen, keyboard, touch pad, and webcam. Those pieces are just bough done, right? Where? Can I get a small quantity (2-3) of them?<p>To wrap up, I am looking for suggestions or ideas about this topic. Also actual link to companies that produces the product above would be amazing.
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noah-kun
Batteries would be the easy part :). But with your level of knowledge, I'd
suggest you first buy a used Macbook, maybe even a broken one, and find
sources of hardware to replace/improve the machine affordably. Also do some
Arduino/Rasperry Pi projects. (I've been a software dev for 5 years and I'm
learning a lot doing the above myself.)

I believe there are a few open source laptop projects in various states of
completeness and goodness. Some ARM, some PowerPC, and so on. There was also
OLPC.

Here's some links. You'll notice you might not like the options. One is an
ultraboook with 1-2 USBs. The others are like, high school science projects :P

[https://hackaday.com/2017/02/05/olimex-announces-their-
open-...](https://hackaday.com/2017/02/05/olimex-announces-their-open-source-
laptop/)

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-
kosagi/novena](https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena)

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-
desktop](https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop)

I'm pretty sure there's some better ones, but ther you go. Oh, and to make
your own board schematics and designs for 3D printed cases I suggest a Macbook
Pro, 2012 or later.

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newman8r
Not an easy project, but you should definitely look to 3d printing for design.
Take a look at projects like this [https://all3dp.com/3d-printed-laptop-
case/](https://all3dp.com/3d-printed-laptop-case/)

