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There’s no shortage of laptop computers available for purchase these days. But finding one with the precise features you want can be trickier – so Byran Huang decided to design one from scratch using a combination of readily available components (like a processor module, display, and mechanical keyboard) and custom designs for parts like a mainboard and chassis.
The resulting laptop is called anyon_e, and it’s a laptop with a 4K AMOLED display, a custom aluminum chassis, about 7 hours of battery life, and an ARM-based processor that’s powerful enough for basic computing and even some light gaming.
Possibly the most impressive thing about this laptop is that it highlights the resources currently available for anyone who wants to design their own hardware these days.
Not only was Byran able to find readily available components like the FriendlyELEC CM3588 with a Rockchip RK3588 processor, but once upon a time it would be prohibitively expensive to design and manufacture a printed circuit board or aluminum chassis – particularly one that measures just 17.5mm (0.69 inches) thick. These days that’s something you can do on a home computer and there are companies that you can send the design files to who will manufacture and ship the resulting hardware to you.
That’s not to say the process of designing, assembling, and configuring software for the laptop was easy. Byran spent more than half a year on the project (which, incidentally, was undertaken as a senior project for high school).
Some of that time was spent selecting and testing components like the CM3588 system-on-a-module, a 13.3 inch 4K AMOLED display, cells for a battery pack, and a wireless keyboard (that can be removed and used with other devices or placed in the laptop. Some was used designing the custom components. And a lot of time was spent configuring firmware and the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system (getting Ubuntu to recognize the 4K AMOLED eDP display involved “finding system logs from Asus laptops that have this display, reverse-engineering the values, and tuning the power-on timings, among other things.”
You can read more about the process of creating the anyon_e laptop at Byran’s blog, check out a YouTube video about the process, or check out the GitHub project for design files and more details about the device’s hardware and software.
via HackADay