[HH] open laptop design

[Tom Metro]

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