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DIY Laptop
Brietech writes "Ever felt like building your own laptop from (almost literally) scratch? This is a microcontroller-based "laptop" built from the ground up from a handful of chips and other hardware found lying around. It runs a self-hosted development environment, allowing the user to write and edit programs in "Chris++" on the machine, and then compile and run them. The carpentry looks like it could use some work, but it's a neat project!"
Yes I would like to be able to build a laptop like I build a desktop. A rickedy wooden box with a 20x4 blue & white, backlit LCD is not a laptop. Well I guess you could put it on your lap, but you know what I mean.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
He used premade components like chips and LCD displays. That's hardly building a laptop from scratch.
With a $50 budget, he could have picked up a 486 laptop that would be much more useful. I have a stack of old thinkpads that I paid nothing for and could part with for $50/ea.
Hope he doesn't use Sony Batteries. That sucker looks like it could catch on fire.
God spoke to me.
So easy, even a cave man could do it!
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
OLPC baby! Give them to the masses.
Your university bookstore sells wood? !
While it may be nothing based on modern laptops, and the title is a bit misleading, i thought it was rather interesting. What was interesting is that he took a proc chip, wrote his own os and compiler. It really was a DIY project. I dont think it needed that big of a box but otherwise it was an interesting find. I would be intrested in if we could really do laptops like we do Desktops, perhaps there is a site out there that has the parts. but over and all this was a interesting find.
string sig = llGetSig("dimentox"); llSay(0,sig);
So why can't there be an industry standard of handheld electronics building blocks? Instead of an iPod, how about an IMod? A cpu block that you can tack on a battery, lens, HD or CF, and headphone amp. Then you create the driving application in some sort of 90's AmigaVision drag-and-drop metaphor.
Why is it in 2007 there still is such a thing as a seperate cell phone, walkman, camera, and you need a 14 year-old with a PhD to try to get a file from one device to the other?
There is an interesting overview of guides to make a do-it-yourself laptop at Repair4Laptop. If you don't want to build it completely from scratch you can consider to make it as a so-called barebone or white box laptop. Barebones are also featured in a separate section of the overview.
Stripping a computer back to its bare essentials is an art. Real hot rods don't have air conditioning. Real computers don't need 3GHz CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and a 500 watt power supply to present an interactive user interface.
Less is more.
I'm sure Chris# will be a much more full-featured language. You should have seen the original Chris language; that was a monster to work with.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
It's sort of like when a friend or relative introduces you to their new baby and you wonder how they managed to get that giant head on that thing, only you can't really say that without hurting their feelings because everyone thinks their baby is the most beautiful one ever. In reality it's just a baby and some of them are not all that attractive, especially to people who don't have or want kids. Which the preface to my comment about that laptop: I'm sorry, but that's just one butt ugly computer.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The PICAXE is in essence a Microchip PIC microcontroller with a custom bootloader to load programs into memory and execute them on reboot/reset.
I was sort of expecting a general CPU, even if a vintage chip like the ZiLOG Z80, MOS Technologies' 6502, Motorola's 6800 / 6802, or intel's 8088 / 8086 microprocessors.
It seems more suited to O'Reilly's MAKE magazine and their blog, then on Slashdot.
It may not win in looks, or processing power, or graphics, or any thing for that matter but it was a neat project. They guy spent some real time piecing things together with chips instead of just using a mini itx board. The fact he made his own language to program it is a definite plus. It isn't something I would make myself but a nice DIY project none the less. I don't quite get what all the complaints are about even if it is a glorified calculator he built it himself. When was the last time any of you built something starting with just a handful of chips?
WTF?
Don't worry the rest of the tree was use for credit card applications, AOL CD mailers and other fine publications.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
Seems like afrotech has some serious competition
http://www.afrotechmods.com/
I once developed my own language called SQUAT - just some higher level functions, basic I/O and a STDIN/STDOUT thang.
Mainly I wanted to be able to tell people that I know SQUAT.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
96 bits should be enough for anybody!