We had some "build my own tablet" discussion previously. Here's a blog posting about a group developing an open laptop design.
Building my Own Laptop http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2686 We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me. This is a lengthy project. Fortunately, ARM CPUs are getting fast enough, and Moore's Law is slowing down, so that even if it took a year or so to complete, I won't be left with a woefully useless design. Today's state of the art ARM CPUs -- quad-core with GHz+ performance levels -- is good enough for most day-to-day code development, email checking, browsing etc. We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It's booting linux, and I'm currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I'd share the design progress with my readers. [...] You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it's possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs. It uses a Freescale iMX6 CPU 1.2 GHz Quad-core Cortex A9 CPU, NEON FPU, and Vivante GC2000 OpenGL ES2.0 GPU. "Fun" features: [...] -Spartan-6 CSG324-packaged FPGA -- has several interfaces to the CPU, including a 2Gbit/s (peak) RAM-like bus -- for your bitcoin mining needs. Or whatever else you might want to toss in an FPGA. -8x FPGA-driven 12-bit, 200ksps analog inputs -8x FPGA-driven digital I/O -8x FPGA-driven PWM headers, compatible with hobby ESC and PWM pinouts -- enables direct interfacing with various RC motor/servo configurations & quad-copter controllers -Raspberry-Pi compatible expansion header -13x CPU-driven supplemental digital I/Os I don't know what cost targets they're aiming for, but it seems like they have a lot of hacker features that are likely to impact the cost. The article goes on to describe a battery management daughter card and other design issues. -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list Hardwarehacking@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking