
Novena Update - 2close4comfort
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4146
======
blueintegral
Boy, hardware is hard. I've designed lots of small things, but never anything
this complicated or mass produced. There are so many things you can get wrong,
so many little adjustments that need to be made. One of the reasons I've loved
following Novena and Bunnie in general is because of his illumination of the
design and production process.

------
elect_engineer
Bunnie Huang is definitely one of the Good Guys. One of the signs that he
really "gets it" regarding open source software and hardware is at the bottom
of his web page: _" This work by Andrew (bunnie) Huang is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported."_

Also see:

Wikipedia: Novena (computing platform)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novena_(computing_platform)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novena_\(computing_platform\))

Wikipedia: Andrew Huang

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

Wired: The Almost Completely Open Source Laptop Goes on Sale

[http://www.wired.com/2014/04/novena/](http://www.wired.com/2014/04/novena/)

Laptop Magazine: Novena Helps Hackers Build Their Own Laptop

[http://blog.laptopmag.com/novena-open-source-
laptop](http://blog.laptopmag.com/novena-open-source-laptop)

Crowd Supply: Novena Open Laptop

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

Crowd Supply: Novena Open Laptop Stretch Goals

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-
laptop/stretc...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-
laptop/stretch-goals)

Note: I have no connection with Bunnie Huang or Novena other than as a fellow
engineer and interested potential customer.

------
kolev
Is this pretty expensive though? "Just the board" costs more than a fully-
equipped laptop. I understand this is not for the mass market given the
pricing and other things, but still...

~~~
nieve
It's got a mass of relatively expensive hardware components that have (almost(
never been included in a laptop form factor and certainly not together. Novena
can replace quite a few expensive discrete tools and do it in something that
can be comfortable carried around and modded. What you're asking is basically
why a full shop with a CNC mill installed in a large truck is so much more
expensive than a nice pickup when the latter can go much faster and is a lot
more comfortable. They share a category and vaguely similar basic shapes, but
they're not really the same thing and you don't use them as if they are. Is
that a helpful analogy?

~~~
pervycreeper
Could you be more specific about the special uses that the Novena has that
commodity laptop lacks?

Disclaimer: if I were a successful engineer, I would most certainly get one of
these purely for the coolness factor.

~~~
nieve
Field replacement for oscilloscopes & some logic analyzer uses. Software
Defined Radio host (the expansion card is in development). Hardware reverse
engineering including bus-sniffing something while it's running. Feeding
signals into stopped or running hardware to plant new firmware in it. Sniffing
crypto keys from running hardware - Bunnie Huang is one of the core Novena
people and he was the one who used an FPGA to sniff the Xbox crypto keys to
allow Xbox Linux to boot. Keyboard & LCD can be switched at will by a user.
The FPGA can be programmed to do many things faster than a general-purpose CPU
and can do fast/wide data capture a CPU simply can't keep up with. The
expansion slots have room and interface capability that can support a lot of
potential new hardware including home-built modules. The list goes on from
there, but my fingers are going on from there.

The CPU & graphics are almost more of a programmer convenience than a
fundamental selling point. You've got to have them, but they're there to
control other things and do some basic number crunching.

------
mmastrac
Always happy to see updates on this project. I waffled for a long time about
backing this project, but ended up not doing so mainly because the time wasn't
right for myself. I'll probably pick one up in a future revision, although if
they shipped one cheaper than the heirloom but with a keyboard built in I'm
definitely in.

