
Building an Open Source Laptop - jamesbritt
http://www.makezine.com/magazine/building-an-open-source-laptop/
======
raphman
from his blog [1]:

 _" Funny story about travel – I was on my way back from 30C3, going through
securty in Frankfurt. The security agent looked at my laptop and asked me what
I do. I said “computer engineer”. He then asks, “did you make it yourself?”
and I sheepishly say yes. His face lights up and he says, “ah, so you can
trust what’s in it! Now that’s taking it seriously.” I was amazed, the guy
totally got it. Wish we had more folks like him working airplane security."_

[1]
[http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3597#comment-1341727](http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3597#comment-1341727)

~~~
kelvin0
Is Frankfurt an American town? Surely it must be, since the Airport security
employee was quite polite, enlightened and seemingly open-minded! Awww... time
for those delusion pills again ... ;-)

------
wyager
Awesome. I wish he used an open-source circuit design tool, but at the same
time, I understand why he didn't.

I honestly think that might be one of the biggest impediments to open
hardware; open-source circuit design software is _not_ good right now. I try
to force myself to use KiCad over EAGLE, but it's such a relative pain in the
ass.

~~~
thirdsight
They're all a pain the ass. Even commercial stuff such as Proteus and
Multisim. Then there's Mentor's offering which is _barf_.

(I did a spot writing some workflow software for an engineering team a few
years back).

~~~
wyager
Honestly, I've always felt that EAGLE was great. They have a severely limited
"free" (as in beer) version, and I really prefer that to KiCad.

It doesn't help that KiCad is horrendously broken on OS X, so I have to use it
in a VM.

------
otoburb
Bunnie Huang[1] is like the Energizer Bunny that keeps going on and on. Glad
to hear that he kept plugging away at the project.

[1] [http://www.bunniestudios.com/](http://www.bunniestudios.com/)

~~~
MattJ100
Off-topic, but something I learned...

I thought surely you meant the "Duracell Bunny", however the Energizer Bunny
does indeed exist, and apparently although it's the later of the two,
Energizer successfully registered the battery-powered bunny trademark in the
US and Canada[1].

Here in the UK I'd say the Duracell bunny is the first to most peoples' minds.

Yes, yes, it's Friday!

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duracell_Bunny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duracell_Bunny)

~~~
mds
Haha, today I learned the opposite of what you learned.

"In Europe & Australia the term "Duracell Bunny" has entered the vernacular as
a term for anything that continues indefatigably while in North America the
term "Energizer Bunny" has a similar connotation."

~~~
otoburb
Believe it or not I actually hesitated when writing that thinking it was
supposed to be Duracell in my mind, but when I said it out loud I was more
comfortable with Energizer.

The power of advertising and repeated exposure. It works :(

------
pasbesoin
Yes, it's Bunnie's laptop. And:

 _The positive response has encouraged us to plan a crowd funding campaign
around a substantially simplified (think “all in one PC” with a battery) case
design..._

It looks like all the positive feedback may result in a production run!

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hoggle
Oh my I love this, open source hardware is the future.

Come to think of how Red Hat is doing great even though they are an open
source company. Why can't this work for hardware as well?

~~~
zanny
> Why can't this work for hardware as well?

I'd be concerned about drafting up blueprints and having them copied by
Chinese manufacturers.

Though what I'd do is make my first system just standard libre rights on
everything, and that should build a platform for me to kickstart / donation
fund future design efforts, and when those are done just release those as free
as the last without a care if someone dupes the hardware because we already
funded the design.

~~~
rch
I'm more concerned that it seems like my only choice is to buy from Chinese
manufacturers.

~~~
dublinben
Why? Are American manufacturers any more trustworthy? Most electronics
products heavily rely on the Chinese supply chain anyway, regardless of where
their final assembly takes place.

~~~
rch
My feelings are more about autonomy and choice for its own sake than trust. In
this context though, I'd just want to be sure I'm supporting the efforts of
people who are responsible for developing products I actually want.

------
tinco
So The Freescale IM.X platform is well documented, that's very nice, and I
know there's no other company offering something even remotely comparable with
more documentation.

It leaves an important question though, there's been speak of NSA/China adding
hardware level backdoors to stuff. Is the fact that the firmware is opensource
enough to be reasonably sure there are no more backdoors?

For example, Intel has put backdoors in the chips that control their ethernet
interfaces. Would something like that be defined in firmware, or at an even
lower level? Would we be able to find out if it was lower level? Would we know
if Freescale did the same?

~~~
Dwolb
What you say is true. Bunnie acknowledges that he can't guarantee a 100%
secure platform,

"Our Novena Project is of course still vulnerable to techniques such as
silicon poisoning, but at least it pushes openness and disclosure down a
layer, which is tangible progress in the right direction. While these heady
principles are great for motivating the journey, actual execution needs a set
of focused requirements."

------
kriro
Somewhat related talk from 30c3 (speaker is a bit dull but the topic matters):
[http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5529_-_en_-_...](http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5529_-_en_-
_saal_2_-_201312271830_-_hardening_hardware_and_choosing_a_goodbios_-
_peter_stuge.html)

Edit: I see the author was also there, nice (the talk I linked is not the one
he gave though)

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stickhandle
have a look at thinkpengiun.com

From the about:

 _Our products are freedom-compatible. Meaning they will work with just about
any free software operating system. This is made possible by selling products
with free software compatible chipsets.

Free software is a set of principles that ensure end-users retain full control
over their computer. Free software can be used, studied, and modified without
restriction.

The chipsets we use encourage community development and user participation.
Users can not be locked into a vendor or product, be forced into an expensive
upgrade, or have other digital restrictions placed on them._

~~~
protomyth
[https://thinkpenguin.com](https://thinkpenguin.com) is the address (u before
i)

------
thirdsight
I appreciate the goal but I'd rather we started with an IP-free core
manufactured by multiple fabs and work up from there. The Chinese got
somewhere with this by ripping off MIPS but I'm not sure that is the right
solution.

Then there's the wireless stack and peripheral space which is even more
complicated.

Edit: this was my intention when I went to university in the early 90's but I
found sitting in front of a Sun workstation drawing squares (gates) very
tedious.

~~~
ash
Building IP-free core/wireless/... seems to be orthogonal to their goal. I
think they would prefer to _use_ such components, but I don't think they are
in the right position to _build_ them. It's enough of a problem that cores
with NDA-free _docs_ are not common (Bunnie wrote about it in the article).

------
macco
Awesome stuff.It's time for a standardized case - a big problem with
laptops.The folder is cool though.

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if_by_whisky
Anyone spec the cost of making one?

~~~
pjc50
The cost of making _one_ it probably several thousand dollars, not counting
the year and a half of Bunnie's time.

From then on it depends on how many you want, and if you can find an assembly
house that will take a tiny order for (say) 1000 of them. Even in large runs I
can't see it costing less than $1000, partly due to the FPGA on the board.
Handcrafted aluminium and leather cases are also likely make up several
hundred dollars of the price. That case looks particularly resistant to mass-
production.

~~~
mcb3k
>"The positive response has encouraged us to plan a crowd funding campaign
around a substantially simplified (think “all in one PC” with a battery) case
design"

It sounds like the design of the case will be changed if these are going to
hit larger scale production, so I don't think that's going to be an issue. It
will still likely be expensive though, unless you do a very large run of them.

------
SunboX
LapPi - A Raspberry Pi Netbook: [http://www.instructables.com/id/LapPi-A-
Raspberry-Pi-Netbook...](http://www.instructables.com/id/LapPi-A-Raspberry-Pi-
Netbook/)

~~~
davexunit
The Raspberry Pi requires a binary blob to function whatsoever, so it doesn't
really make sense to use for the purpose of an open source laptop.

------
rch
I've wanted a FPGA in my laptop for 10+ years. Brilliant.

------
AhtiK
This project is hopefully laying the foundation for a decent laptop with
Cherry MX switches! [1]

Yes, current design is using ThinkPad chiclet but we can still hope, right?

[1] There's also Cherry ML for laptops but I haven't seen those switches
myself nor heard about a laptop using it...

~~~
groups
It's not a chiclet keyboard. Looks like the keyboard for the thinkpad X220. in
my experience it's a very good keyboard. of course I would pay a lot of money
for a mechanically-keyed laptop.

~~~
AhtiK
woops, yes, I stand corrected, X220 is not chiclet .-)

My T520 is so far the best non-mechanical for me. Possibly the same keyboard
as in X220?

------
static332
pardon my ignorance, but how this is different from non-branded chinese
laptops. since those are non-branded i guess they don't have legal rights over
it too.

~~~
andor
This is a laptop for hardware development and security research, hence the
features [0]:

* FPGA on the mainboard

* Lots of digital and analog IO headers connected to CPU and FPGA

* Dual Ethernet

* USB OTG

Also, it's not just about licensing, but about having more control over the
hardware.

[0]
[http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page](http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page)

------
chatman
"Open source laptop"? Physical objects don't have a source, either open or
close. It is rather a laptop capable of running on only "free software" for
full functionality.

~~~
alan_cx
While accepting the other replies, I do wonder how hardware trust is achieved.
The security point about open source is peer review. For a dunce like me, I
can pretty much rely on people much smarter than me to review open sourced
code. In reasonable time, if there is a iffy routine buried in some bit of
software, such people will out it. So, people like me can pretty much trust
it, and even if something is missed but later found, again, we can be sure the
discoverer will report it, while a commercial organisation might be motivated
to hide it.

But, how does that work with hardware? How do we trust all the chips? How do
we know there isn't something iffy built in at manufacture? Then, how can
those same cleverer than me people discover it? How do they inspect the
encased silicone circuit?

So, in that vein, I see the point you might have been making, and actually, I
think its a worthwhile question. Because to me, it does look like what you
describe, a sort of closed source hardware which runs all open source
software. And I personally dont _know_ that that is safe. Or is it?

~~~
drone
Open-source hardware and software are analogous in this sense: pre-built
hardware is like pre-built software. You can only truly trust it if you built
it yourself. However, unlike pre-built software, often you can visually
determine if high-order modifications have been made, e.g. additional
components, re-routed traces, etc.

You can't really trust silicon, and this leads to a larger point about much of
what has been called open-source hardware: many of the open-source boards out
there which are really popular are little more than reference designs
translated from a datasheet to a schematic capture program for a closed-source
blob of silicon. However, this point doesn't escape many people in "the
movement," the problem has just been that the technology that meets the users'
expectation of performance and capability is out of their financial reach to
duplicate. So, the users settle for "re-create" when they can, rather than
"trust at all levels". In the majority of cases, absolute trust is not
required, because a breech of that trust can result in practically nothing.
("Oh, this AVR chip is back-doored, allowing you to access its 32k of flash,
but I haven't provided any means by which a 3rd party could access that via
hardware.")

