News Student builds open-source laptop in 6 months — uses 4K AMOLED screen and has 7h battery life

[Admin]

Student Brian Huang builds a fully open-source laptop in six months as part of his senior school project.

Student builds open-source laptop in 6 months — uses 4K AMOLED screen and has 7h battery life : Read more

 

[COLGeek]

Two thumbs up for this project. Well done!

 

[ezst036]

Its criminal that all these parts aren't standardized and freely-ready off the shelf with numerous different laptop-intended motherboard, laptop case, laptop power supply, and laptop monitor options.

 

[stonecarver]

Brian Huang if you ever bump into this thread on Tom's just want to say great job.

 

[prayforsurfinfl]

Student Brian Huang builds a fully open-source laptop in six months as part of his senior school project.

Student builds open-source laptop in 6 months — uses 4K AMOLED screen and has 7h battery life : Read more

Wait a couple of days and then check Amazon. There's probably half a dozen potential sellers right now putting together kits that will duplicate Student Brian's project.

 

[abufrejoval]

I'd say that's a pretty good job application as a laptop designer.

But the media production ability of this generation is also really awsome, the video was both impressive and fun!

As to the Rockchip, much like the Raspberry PI5 it's really not a good match for a laptop design and by now just too old and slow to be really attractive in a notebook. I got an RK3588 based Orange Pi 5+ with 32GB running Debian and Proxmox on a 4k screen (in a cluster with an RP5), but GPU accelleration is only offered with Ubuntu and support is really stagnating: Rockchip seems either understaffed or busy elsewhere (sanction resilient RISC-V?).

Turns out they were quite busy with new hardware form factors: newer variants such as the RP5 ultra offer MIPI DSI TX 4 lane interfaces that can directly be used to attach display panels. And there is the compute module with a tablet variant base board, which also breaks out the full set of MIPI ports the OP5+ variant didn't, so his efforts would be much reduced today if he started with that.

Too bad phone SoCs have ditched many of the parts laptops still need and there really isn't any SBC or compute modules except outrageously priced development boards. I've long hoped for Huawei to come up with an updated Kirin based board with Linaro, but they got blacklisted instead.

Of course there are Nvidia (Orion?) chips and baseboards, that would have been much more powerful. And perhaps the Samsung XR SoCs (e.g. Quest 3) would deliver what the phone SoCs are missing, so claiming the "fastest available chip" clearly omits the "[for my budget]" clause, same reason I got the OP5+, which is very comparable to Jasper Lake Atoms in every which way, including price.

I guess the most impressive part of this project was to show that doing such a one-off PCB and chassis design using service companies was feasible on a money and time budget where he didn't resto-mod a car instead. Economically it's still insane given what you can get for €500-€1000 new these days, so I don't really expect many imitators, let alone mass production.

But this evidently was an engineering thesis and job application and I'm pretty sure it got him an A+, if not a job, too.

 

[abufrejoval]

Its criminal that all these parts aren't standardized and freely-ready off the shelf with numerous different laptop-intended motherboard, laptop case, laptop power supply, and laptop monitor options.

I'm pretty sure Framework analyzed the RK3588's potential and the fact that they onle came up with an even slower RISC-V variant is because that at least has some (developer) unicorn potential.

"Criminal" hints at conspiracy, which is way too popular these days, but in this case at worst vendor marget segmentation; but mostly reflects low attraction in a crowded market where scale is everything.

And as much as I like Framework in theory, I still prefer to buy the same capabilities at less than 50% price baked into a fixed device that I can sell or give away. But then so far only one out of perhaps 30 notebooks has ever died on me: after ten years of service.

And if your "criminal" referred to ecology, I'm not convinced that Framework can make much of a difference. The main eco debt is still in chip manufacturing and there the Chinese selling resoldered RAM, mainboards or GPUs might actually be doing better, even if ecology is the least of their motivations.