
Building my Own Laptop - beambot
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2686
======
beambot
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...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4686.en.html)

[2] video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37SBMyGoCAU>

~~~
w1ntermute
See an interview with Bunnie here: <http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/>

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

------
3amOpsGuy
I'd be conscious about the LIPO battery choice & potential fire risk.

They're absolutely fine when treated with care (i've had many for years for RC
planes & helis and never had more than minor issues), but i'd be concerned
people are used to not having to care about their batteries.

If you discharge them below ~ 1.1v per cell (higher for cheaper ones) they
don't quite explode but it's not a slow burn either:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcwOwf55Rtc>

There are other options like li-ion or, slightly lower voltage per cell but
you can pretty much abuse them and they won't blow up: A-123's.

EDIT: for clarity, discharging to 1v alone shouldn't cause a fire, it's the
act of charging them from that state.

~~~
beambot
Nah, just use lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries. They're not quite as
energy dense as LiPO, but they have longer lifetimes, better power density,
and are WAY safer.

You'll see a lot of roboticists using these already (for safety reasons). For
example, you can grab some nice Turnigy LiFePO4's at most hobby shops.

------
guylhem
If only for the integrated FPGA, I'm interested!

One suggestion: it could be made cheaper and maybe more interesting by
removing the screen altogether (there's an HDMI port !) to do a C64-like
computer, with a tiny smartphone-like internal screen.

We all have multiple screens already - such as tablets or smartphones we
carry.

~~~
nrp
Presumably the board will also be offered on it's own, without anything
connected to the LVDS interface. One of Bunnie's previous projects, the
Chumby, is available this way.

<https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10106>

~~~
georgemcbay
SparkFun is awesome, one of my favorite places to buy hardware hackery stuff
along with Adafruit and Newark, but if you want to hack on this board for
cheaper you can buy Insignia Infocast 3.5 units off ebay for around $40, half
the price. The board inside is virtually the same as the Chumby Hacker Board
(different arrangements of some of the headers and ports, IIRC) and it comes
with a wifi module, 3.5 inch LCD w/resistive touchscreen, speakers, etc.

At $80 for the Chumby Hacker Board most people are better off just buying a
rasp-pi, the CPU and memory in it crush the falconwing board and there's a
much larger active community of people hacking on it so you get easy access to
newer linux kernel versions, distros, etc, but at $40 and including the
LCD/touchscreen, wifi, speakers, etc [infocast|chumby One] are still a great
deal to use just for hacking on. Still slower than the pi but having the lcd
touchscreen/accelerometer/speakers/bend sensor buttons/wifi/etc gives you a
lot of stuff to hack on out of the box that you'll have to pay extra for on
the pi.

------
JDuMond
It'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 work it's magic in the prices of
signal validation equipment and at least a few hacker spaces will be able to
gather enough cash to pony up for a 10 GHz scope and a nice logic analyser.

~~~
TerraHertz
Actually it's been easily possible for years. Just forget about buying new
equipment and buy older Tektronix or HP sampling scopes on ebay. For eg the HP
54121T, a 20GHz scope with TDR, able to characterize trace impedance
absolutely workably for modern motherboard applications. I got a perfectly
functioning one on ebay for $600. Also you can get the service manuals, which
you can't for more recent equipment.

------
jacquesm
This is an absolutely awesome project, mad props to the guy for envisioning it
and pulling through. The cost must work out to something terrible but I can
totally see why someone would do this.

Having an FGPA on there is a very clever idea, it adds flexibility to the
design in a way that a prototyping area would but much cleaner. The one corner
with all the PWM and other connectors is the most interesting part, I really
wonder what kind of plans he's got with this but it goes way beyond 'just
another laptop'.

If someone did a 'Bunnie Huang uses this' post I'd be all over it, the tool
collection to create a design like this would be extremely interesting
reading.

~~~
dshep
Kind of old but there is one, <http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/>

~~~
jacquesm
Thank you for digging that up!

Interesting, he mentions that he'd love to have a triple screen capable
laptop, but then when he has a chance to make his own it has two possible
monitor attachments. Or did I miss something? Anyway, with USB->hdmi adapters
this may no longer be as much of an issue.

For instance:

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119460)

------
CaioAlonso
>so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque
blobs

So this means that this will probably appeal to the free software people that
only use 100% free computers?

~~~
stephengillie
More importantly, people will be using and modifying these, both in software
and hardware, for the next ~30 years. During that time, how many other devices
will get left behind because we can't extend and modify their software to meet
our new use cases?

------
noonespecial
It's like watching a Jedi construct his own light-saber.

~~~
semisight
If not more ambitious, considering the small, unfriendly nature of laptop
hardware. Good luck to OP!

~~~
dfox
I would assume that building your own lightsaber, given it's form factor,
would involve significant amount of laptop-like small, unfriendly electronics
(not to mention fiddling with force fields and other advanced physics) :)

~~~
andrewflnr
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.

~~~
SquareWheel
Only on Hacker News.

~~~
unimpressive
What has wrong with that comment?

~~~
SquareWheel
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.

------
pasbesoin
Don't know whether this fits, but here's something I'd like from the power
system: Automated battery maintenance. I'm plugged in, a lot, and I forget to
/ blow off periodically cycling my battery. (Admittedly, maybe I'm unusual /
an edge case, in this, and my thoughts here are of little general value.)

I'd like a power system that can be made to periodically and contextually
select to run from battery, even while plugged in, so that the battery can be
cycled in a manner that maintains its capacity.

So, when, every some weeks, I do need to run from battery, it's still in
decent shape. Without my having to manually ensure this on an ongoing basis.

I doubt its' a priority for Bunnie, but what the heck, I'll throw the idea out
there. When else do I have even a chance of having any input into a laptop's
design?

Oh, and thank goodness for an(other) open alternative to "secure boot" (maybe
nice in principle, but very potentially malicious in current execution).

~~~
Ives
Only what you're suggesting isn't actually battery maintenance. In fact, it
will decrease the capacity of your battery (by as much as a normal drain-
recharge cycle of course).

Cycling the battery will however _appear_ to improve the capacity by
recalibrating the internal circuitry. That's still somewhat useful to a user,
but much less than battery maintenance would be.

PS: From what I understand this only applies to modern Li-Ion batteries, if
you're using different battery technology your mileage may vary. Some battery
technologies do benefit from being periodically cycled.

~~~
pasbesoin
Maybe I'm not up to speed on the latest developments, but I currently have two
laptops whose batteries have essentially been reduced to short duration UPS's.

I should be more pro-active, but I forget, or I worry that I'll discharge
right before I need to be charged up. And one sits on a spare table, doing its
thing all by itself, much of the time.

They tend to stay plugged in and on overnight. It would be nice if, e.g. once
a week or so -- whatever's best for the battery at hand -- the power system
could run a discharge /recharge cycle "in the middle of the night" or similar.

In my experience, batteries still have memories (that shrink over time and
with lack of cycling), and from what I read periodic cycling is the solution.

If Bunnie can find an acceptable fuel cell option, of course I'm all for that.
;-)

P.S. I think I do at least partway understand what you're saying, that being
that rechargeable batteries have a limited number of cycles and tend to loss
capacity with increasing cycle count.

However, in my case, it appears to be a lack of cycling that is catching up
with me well before the above does.

~~~
jakeonthemove
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).

~~~
Too
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.

~~~
jakeonthemove
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.

~~~
pasbesoin
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.

------
flashmob
Ultimate hackers laptop would be one without a wide-screen! Bring back the 4:3
displays that we had in the old day please. These were good for reading and
editing text/code. You can't buy any decent laptop without a wide-screen, so
you will have no competition in this area.

~~~
jarek
> You can't buy any decent laptop without a wide-screen

You can - just not a new one. There's plenty that can still be done with a
T60p with a C2D and 3 GB of RAM.

~~~
Zak
Yes. For starters, you can put in a T61 motherboard (14" 4:3 model only, and
avoid Nvidia GPUs - they're all defective) and 8GB of RAM. Minor alterations
to the frame are required.

------
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.

------
6ren
Moore's law is not decelerating - transistor _density_ is doubling on
schedule, with process shrinks happening like clockwork. Smartphone
performance has actually been doubling yearly - better than Moore's Law.

If there are _fewer_ transistors, it's because we haven't worked out how to
use them effectively; or they aren't demanded by customers. If not in demand,
other ways of improving performance won't be in demand.

It's this pattern of improvements overshooting demand that Clayton Christensen
wrote about.

~~~
zanny
People think inverse Moores Law is slowing with Intel, but Intel has just been
committing more and more die in their chips to onboard graphics. I wonder how
Ivy Bridge E will perform with 435mm wafers, though Sandy Bridge E was kind of
a let down (I'd imagine that is more architecture shortfalls with 1/4 the
cores shut off).

But yeah, consumer demand just mandates something that can run a web browser
as fast as IO bandwidth allows. You don't even really need video decoding
since you can offload that to hardware acceleration.

People should realize we are at another threshold with Moores law - in a few
years we should have transistor density high enough (I'd imagine during the
CPU 14nm era) to be able to embed a full compute environment (I'd imagine a
dual core Cortex a15) with a gig of ram and the necessary chipset fixings for
an integrated wireless AC NIC that is the size of a penny, maybe off one fab
line, maybe even integrated on one die. Full computers with 500mbit wireless
spectrum bandwidth to be able to stream off video, printers, data, etc in
parallel. Probably runs on a watt or two too. You could probably run that off
solar.

Think about it - you could have traffic cameras doing realtime video analysis
processing on solar power. Solar-powered wireless routers you can just glue on
top of lamp posts run by the sun. You could have a full computer that you
wear, powered by the kinematic energy of motion or maybe a novel heat leech
tech to utilize ambient body heat. And you think phones were a big deal!

I wouldn't be surprised if we could do something similar with a single core
Cortex a9 (maybe around 600mhz) with 128mb of ram and 802.11b (maybe even g or
n) right now in a similar power package (maybe 4 - 5 watts).

~~~
sbierwagen

      Solar-powered wireless routers you can just glue on top of 
      lamp posts run by the sun.
    

Stross, Doctorow. "Unwirer" (2003)

    
    
        She handed him the Motorola batarang he'd glimpsed earlier. 
        The underside had a waxed-paper peel-off strip and when he 
        lifted a corner, his thumb stuck so hard to the tackiness 
        beneath that he lost the top layer of skin when he pulled 
        it loose. He turned it over in his hands.
    
        "How's it powered?"
    
        "Dirt-cheap photovoltaics charging a polymer cell -- 
        they're printed in layers, the entire case is a slab of 
        battery plus solar cell. It doesn't draw too many amps, 
        only sucks juice when it's transmitting. Put one in a 
        subway car and you've got an instant ad-hoc network that 
        everyone in the car can use. Put one in the next car and 
        they'll mesh."

------
caublestone
This is incredible. In a time where it seems the big pc designers are shifting
appeal to the facebook heavy consumer market, developers need a new source. Id
love to see this snow ball into open source phones, tablets, glass etc. and an
open ubiquitous wireless network.

------
otoburb
Perhaps RMS will either contract Bunnie to create a replica for him, or he'll
use Bunnie's open schematics to create his own. Then he can upgrade from his
Yeeloong laptop or at least have an alternative with a bigger screen.

From what I recall, one of RMS's concerns was open firmware, which Bunnie has
as one of the project goals.

------
mrb
The integration of an FPGA on the motherboard is one of the most interesting
features that differentiates it from regular laptops. The author points it can
be used "for your bitcoin mining needs".

I couldn't find which model of Spartan6 it is exactly. However if it is an
LX150 (the one with the most logic units, used by the entire Bitcoin
community), there is no way he can fit a decent heatsink for proper thermal
dissipation. A typical mining implementation generates so much heat that
heatsinks this big need to be used (actual picture of one of the first dual-
LX150 boards built specifically for mining):
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/forum/angle_a_heatsinks_600...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/forum/angle_a_heatsinks_600.jpg)

------
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?

~~~
haldean
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>

~~~
joezydeco
Aren't the chipmakers like Broadcom (for rPi) and Freescale (the i.MX in
Bunnie's design) taking the burden of this licensing fee? It would be a lot
easier for them to roll the $0.15 into their part costs than hassle their
customers with taking care of this licensing.

~~~
haldean
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

------
grannyg00se
Looks awesome. I'd love to have this integrated into a Thinkpad keyboard along
with some kind of HDMI display glasses that don't suck.

------
jrockway
Looks like RMS is very close to being able to upgrade his laptop.

------
marshray
I liked the part (literally) about the Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA.

Who knows what kind of cool stuff that could lead to?

~~~
beambot
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...]

~~~
npsimons
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).

------
gallerytungsten
For further reading, I highly recommend Bunnie's book on hacking the Xbox.

------
CamperBob2
Shame there's no external high-speed bus for that FPGA. If there were, this
would be an interesting platform for software-defined radio and high speed DAQ
products.

------
primitur
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! :)

------
chrisu_de
It would be interesting to know how much this costs.

------
JagMicker
Analog battery meter? Why go through all this trouble, and then take a step-
back by including some analog meter?

~~~
jacquesm
Because they're hackers and it's fun. Like having a steam bleed valve on the
side of your electric car :)

~~~
lostlogin
Great comment. Wow steam engines are great, and at small scale they are even
better. Dual action, those centrifugal governors, and the smell of that
lubricant oil mixed with hot water. I'd never before considered messing about
with small steam engines to be hacking... That used to waste many an
afternoon. Don't fuse the safety valve though, that's a bad way to get power
and eye brow re-growth takes ages and annoys one's mother.

------
tsahyt
Quad-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.

------
shaunxcode
The raspberry pi expansion header is genius. I really hope this sees the light
of day.

------
Nux
WANT! I will buy one.

Meanwhile maybe someone can come up with something based on the Raspberry Pi.
:-)

~~~
quarterto
[http://liliputing.com/2012/06/turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-
lapto...](http://liliputing.com/2012/06/turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-laptop-
with-a-70-motorola-lapdock.html)

~~~
Nux
Super-cool! Cheers for that.

------
gaussianblur
Hope to see a tablet come next!

------
mcot2
Samsung already has a cortex a15 chip. If this takes a year it will be
woefully out of date using an a9.

------
iamtherockstar
FPGA development has been one of those things that I've _really_ wanted to get
into, but each time, I spend _days_ trying to get a toolchain set up (using
the free Xilinx tools on Linux and/or Windows), and by then I'm tired, and
decide to take a break. By the time I get back to it, the toolchain doesn't
work anymore (because of some licensing crap) so I have to start all over.

I don't think I've been this excited about hardware in a long time. I'd
kickstart this thing in a heartbeat.

