
Acer Travelmate 4150 retrofitting to Raspberry Pi Laptop, Part 1 - mitola
https://codeandunicorns.com/acer-travelmate-4150-retrofitting-raspberry-pi-laptop-part-1-lcd-cleanup/
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jerf
I'm interested in the results of this, but I'd suggest holding off and posting
this to HN (and elsewhere) when the task is done. At the moment what we've got
here is a goal and a disassembled laptop with absolutely nothing hooked up to
the Pi, which is not really that interesting.

I'd also suggest that sufficiently interesting stories about why you couldn't
manage to do this would also be interesting. ("I couldn't ever get the
adaptor"... probably not interesting. "So I had to 3D print it, which was
harder than I expected."... interesting. "I tried for weeks to get the RPi
working and it _almost_ sorta worked but it was only in monochrome and I
couldn't figure out why."... interesting, and probably enough to trigger other
people to want to help!)

~~~
catdog
Indeed not a very interesting read at that point, the idea itself is nice but
pretty obvious. There is also nothing concrete about tackling the hard tasks
like power supply or interfacing with the keyboard yet.

The author only briefly talked about the LCD driver board but didn't even
mention which one he bought let alone share any experiences how it worked out.
A "look the screen shows the output of the pi now, thats how I did it" or "I
tried … and the screen is still black, not that easy as thought" would have
been a better start for submitting such an article series to a wider audience.

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thomnottom
Somewhat humorous in light of this comment on Schneier's post about the laptop
ban:

"Get the 15" laptop, throw all the electronics away, leave just screen and
keyboard. Put Raspberry Pi and three AA batteries inside. Voila - you are able
to show TSA staff that this is really laptop, which executes some code, and
have a lot of space inside to put in explosives.

Moreover, you have powerful processor and lots of program-controled pins to
implement timer initiator."

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/the_tsas_sele...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/the_tsas_select.html#c6749022)

~~~
VLM
The problem with hollywood movie plots is people have been able to remove the
optical drive or floppy drive from a laptop for decades, insert a baggie of
weed or whatever criminal activity.

To some extent avoiding TSA scrutiny might be a goal behind the apparently
meaningless quest for thin laptops at apple. No removable parts means you
can't rip parts out and insert a baggie of whatever in the case. Also the
laptop being lightweight means whatever you're sneaking in can't be too heavy,
if a laptop is lighter than a derringer even if it physically fits its going
to be weird explaining why your laptop weighs twice as much as a normal
laptop.

Also I'm sure this looks fascinating on the xray machine.

~~~
bitwize
> The problem with hollywood movie plots is people have been able to remove
> the optical drive or floppy drive from a laptop for decades, insert a baggie
> of weed or whatever criminal activity.

Indeed. And a decade or more before the movie's purported date of 2025, we
realized that Johnny Mnemonic would be better served smuggling data by
swallowing a toy balloon with micro SD cards in it. Today he could get away
with just three or four cards.

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Sanddancer
This might be of help to you. The OEM version of this laptop seems to be the
Compal LA-2601. Which is a very good thing, because the schematics are readily
available [1]. So, getting the keyboard working with a PI3 should be a matter
of rigging up a micro with enough pins to drive the matrix controller. Looks
like an interesting project though, and I wish you good luck.

[1]
[http://www.s-manuals.com/pdf/motherboard/compal/compal_la-26...](http://www.s-manuals.com/pdf/motherboard/compal/compal_la-2601_r1.0_schematics.pdf)

~~~
dmitrygr
How do you know this and how did you find that?

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Sanddancer
Google diving. I got curious as to what the keyboard controller was, so I
looked up motherboard pictures and specs and eventually found that it uses an
ENE KB910 for the keyboard controller. Searching there for how things were set
up was mostly fruitless, until I stumbled upon a russian forum which had a
pinout for the KB910 [1]. A few more stumbles and I found a result that stated
that Compal was the OEM for the laptop -- it's not uncommon for laptops to be
made by a white box maker. From there, a search for the model number brought
up multiple sites with the schematics.

[1] [http://bit.ly/2ob7YaG](http://bit.ly/2ob7YaG) Not the actual url, because
chrome's history ate that.

~~~
mitola
Impressive :) Thanks a lot for your dive into the subject. It's darn
interesting indeed

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lovelearning
Fun project. Will be interesting to see how this evolves.

There are also a couple of build kits like [1] for people who don't want to
mess with old laptops and weird connectors. I don't have one, but I saw it in
Ben Heck's youtube channel and thought it's pretty cool.

[1]: [https://pi-top.com/product/pi-top](https://pi-top.com/product/pi-top)

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uncleleech
I think this is a good idea but as mentioned in the article the connectors to
keyboard and monitor are hard.

I guess there are XF86 standards and stuff for the keyboard but I still find
it hard to think that it will behave exactly like the original.

Further, I would like to see more info on if the LCD gets working with the RPi
because it seems like a great project.

Still, good luck with how the conversion works in the end!

~~~
mitola
I was actually quite suprised how hard it is. The amount of different LCD and
subsequent separated driver panels that are possible in configuration is
absolutely huge. To be honest I am a lot less worried about LCD working then
keyboard, since in the worst case I would need to rewire the whole one
manually. But for LCD I will hopefully have everything needed after getting my
specific LVDS driver board

~~~
rzzzt
A mapping for the keyboard matrix can be "discovered" by pressing all keys in
sequence. There are lots of AVR-based projects that emulate an USB HID for a
custom keyboard matrix or other input; for an example, see [1][2].

[1]
[https://deskthority.net/wiki/Easy_AVR_USB_Keyboard_Firmware](https://deskthority.net/wiki/Easy_AVR_USB_Keyboard_Firmware)

[2]
[https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=51252.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=51252.0)

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deng
I understand the joy of tinkering, but why do you want to downgrade a working
Intel Centrino 1.73GHz to an RPi3?

[EDIT] See below, seems that the laptop is already broken.

~~~
candeira
Because, once it's working, you have an upgradable laptop: every time a new
rPI comes out, you can swap it out.

Eventually you'll have a better/faster computer than the Intel Centrino, with
potentially much better battery life, modern hardware (USB3+, better radio
connectivity), better software support (for instance, mainstream Linux distros
are now deprecating support for non-PAE CPUs).

I've been giving this some thought: I have a gutted MacBook Pro I plan to
perform the same surgery on. Someone spilled soda on it, so the mainboard was
already fried... therefore it's not even a downgrade. It's an upgrade from a
brick.

~~~
deng
Reason I'm asking is: I have an old Centrino laptop as well as an RPi2 and
RPi3. The Centrino is so much faster than the RPi's, it's not even in the same
league. And as long as the Raspberrys are married to Broadcom, I think it will
take quite some time until we have an RPi that has similar speed like my old
Centrino. Don't get me wrong, I love my RPis, and if my old Centrino breaks,
maybe I'd do something similar, but I'd never trash it while it's still
working. Just seems wasteful to me.

~~~
wink
It could also be not only about pure speed - look at what even the RPi 1 can
do in terms of media playback. My (working) Centrino laptop can just barely
play youtube html 5 videos. If you want a small mediaplayer (remember those
portable DVD players? :P) this sounds totally viable.

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pmontra
I've got an old Asus L3000D from early 2000 in a bag. I took it out and looked
at it. The keyboard is great, the screen is almost 1:1, a two buttons
touchpad, floppy disk, DVD recorder, mic, audio jack, two 1394 ports (I forgot
what they are), parallel, serial, VGA, two USB (1.1?), PCI express?, ethernet
and modem :-) TV out, PS2 mouse and keyboard. Maybe without all the internal
components it won't weight more that 1.5 kg. I remember I made it crawl with
Ubuntu circa 2010. Perhaps I should give it a try as a Raspberry case.

~~~
agumonkey
I often think (dream) of a partial solution; using a rpi as a coprocessor,
daughter card. My 2006 core 2 duo is fine for 90% of tasks, except for video
decoding. Delegating that to a tiny gpu/vpu would release the main cpu for
logic and IO.

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hawski
How much weights the gutted laptop? How much can it weight after it will be
finished?

~~~
mitola
I can update you on that. At the moment the heaviest part of the laptop is the
display. But I think it may not be bellow 2kg, but above. I can update when I
have a better estimate.

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roryisok
Sounds like you might have a balance problem after you get everything working.
Might need to machine in a surface style kick stand

~~~
mitola
After a bit more investigation while I wait for the parts... I think it should
be quite fine, beacuse the battery will probably be the heaviest part, but it
is quite possible that either left or right side of the laptop will be quite
heavier. Hopefully I'll make it fit :D I found an interesting battery with 12V
in and separate 12 out and another 5V USB out, so it should be fairly
straightforward hopefully with that to power everything with it.

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technofiend
RP3 laptop cases making appearance on Alibaba in 5....4.....3....

~~~
extra88
There's already the pi-top [0]. I've been considering getting one for work to
use without a Raspberry Pi. It connects to the Pi using HDMI and USB so it
might work as a portable, battery-powered version of a rack mount console.

[0] [https://pi-top.com/product/pi-top](https://pi-top.com/product/pi-top)

