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Progress On the Open Laptop
An anonymous reader writes "Last October, we discussed Andrew 'bunnie' Huang's effort to build a complete open hardware laptop, called the Novena. bunnie has now posted a progress report on the laptop's design and construction, showing the latest revision of the board, the display, and a hack to use it as a secure router. bunnie says, 'At the end of the day, we're having fun building the laptop we always wanted — it's now somewhere between a python-scriptable oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and a laptop. I think it will be an indispensable tool for hacking, particularly for doing signal analysis which requires coordination across multiple protocol layers, complex trigger conditions and/or feedback stimulus loops. As for the inevitable question about if these will be sold, and for how muchonce we're done building the system (and, "done" is a moving target — really, the whole idea is this is continuously under development and improving) I'll make it available to qualified buyers. Because it's open-source and a bit quirky, I'm shy on the idea of just selling it to anyone who comes along wanting a laptop. I'm worried about buyers who don't understand that "open" also means a bit of DIY hacking to get things working, and that things are continuously under development."
Great - now go there and stay.
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The one that richard stallman used? Or was it like custom made or something?
This one has a fairly decent display at 2560x1700 (should that be 1600?), unlike the crappy 1024x600 that Stallman finds acceptable.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
No, I think Stallman's laptop just happened to have a free BIOS. IIRC Stallman does not think that free hardware is nearly as important as free software. This is a an open/free source hardware design meaning that anyone could theoretically grab the design files, do whatever changes they want and then start producing the board.
The integrated circuits are for the most part closed designs of course. If you want to design a completely and utterly open laptop you must first design an open universe...
The sites cannot be directly compared. Reddit is a pure message board, Slashdot a news aggregator. I use both.
I'm not sure this meets the standard criteria for a laptop these days. That doesn't mean it isn't a valid, useful device, but if you think about the things most people buy a laptop to *do*, they're going to be secondary to the function of this machine. When you say "Laptop" people think "Sophisticated operating system, wide range of available software, media player, useful for software development, gaming machine (maybe), interfaces with wide range of modern portable devices, etc).
This sounds like it's got a rather different set of capabilities in mind. Apple probably wouldn't like "HackBook", but it seems to fit better.
You can get a bit closer by using FPGAs.
and video ram for it?
What an outrageous notion! The only qualification is that one is willing to trade for it; who are you to determine that for someone else?
True, you can get a lot more open in terms of intellectual content or intellectual property by using FPGA:s.
You are still writing ones and zeros to memories with an FPGA and you are still dependent on a proprietary part, but those ones and zeroes can have a much more radical impact on how the machine works if it is based around an FPGA than if it is based around a hard CPU.
"The sites cannot be directly compared. Reddit is a pure message board, Slashdot a news aggregator."
For sites that can't be directly compared, you sure did a rather direct job.
I'm shy on the idea of just selling it to anyone who comes along wanting a laptop. I'm worried about buyers who don't understand that "open" also means a bit of DIY hacking to get things working, and that things are continuously under development.
I use "open" software all the time and I certainly don't do any DIY hacking to get it running and keep it running. So why does this "open" hardware have such a different interpretation? I can only surmise that "open" is actually being used as a synonym of "incomplete".
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Did anyone else notice that the screen in the router case photo has a partially obscured Futurama video playing?
"Lame" - Galaxar
I couldn't help notice the line calling this (among other things) a python-scripted oscilloscope.
As an engineer, let me say, "To heck with the laptop bit, where do I sign up and buy one?"
Daughter boards. WiFi (if you must), Bluetooth (if you must), and Analog Channels, Bay-Bee!
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Well, it's still nice that you bothered to sign up so you could tell this to us.
Except that this is exactly what he didn't do. Your analogy would be fine if he said something like "Reddit uses Javascript. Slashdot uses comment trees." Both statements correct, but none of them indicating any similarities or differences between the two. But when you describe Reddit as a "pure message board" and Slashdot as a "news aggregator", I think it's safe to say that one of the things that come to most people's mind that it indicates a difference in the sense that Reddit is probably going to have a significantly higher proportion of user-generated (primary) contents (not just links with summaries).
Ezekiel 23:20
Fucking engineer's fucking wet fucking dream, this
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I thought Lemote already achived this, or no? Stallman uses a Lemote and claims it is completely open...right down to the BIOS
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
If you've written the FPGA logic in a standard language like Verilog, then there's not much keeping you from moving the code between different FPGA chips, or even chips from different vendors.
Of course, the idea of using FPGAs in a laptop seems rather silly to me; the whole point of having a laptop is to have something small which can be powered by a battery for a reasonable length of time. Using FPGAs instead of real ASICs and CPUs would drastically lower your run time. You might as well give up on the laptop idea if you're going to do that, and just make your own FPGA-based mini/microATX/miniITX motherboard and use standard desktop parts instead. Then you can plug in any monitor you want, and most of the other parts are commodity as well.
There is the Open RISC platform, which is under GPL. It's essentially the HDL code of a MIPS variant that can be used on FPGAs. So if one built a computer - probably not a laptop - using that, then the hardware would be open as well if all the chips on the PCB were programmable i.e. either FPGA or Flash.
Although I do wonder whether anybody, no matter how good at Verilog or VHDL, would try to reprogram the FPGAs on the card and redefine the interfaces b/w the parts? That would be the underlying point to having it open in the first place. Otherwise, once such a design is frozen, spin out ASICs based on that code, and optimize the power consumption vs performance.
The point about free hardware being less important - once un-programmable parts are used in a platform, there goes the idea of doing anything w/ the GNU's Freedom 3 - the right to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, 'so that the whole community benefits'. At that point, there is little difference b/w that, and a closed source hardware platform made up of unalterable parts. Yeah, most vendors may publish their specs, but that's not the same as giving a piece of hardware that can be altered any way one likes.
The FPGA is intended to make this a good hacking tool, rather then a replacement for basic common components.
The idea here seems to be most definitely to make the kind of laptop we always wish we had from the movies - got some wires, want to see what's going on? A few twisted splices and you're looking at signal traces directly.
It's that "pure message board" that some of us have missed over the years. Any subject, any level of detail, alternative accounts welcomed (we love the AC here, we love the alt-accounts there), the RES Firefox add-on (thought Firefox was a memory hog? Use this add-on and see the magic smoke in action), cats, cats, more cats and don't subscribe to the cat memes.
I like the long posts on there. Before finding Reddit, it had been a while since I spent a whole evening reading people's comments, something I used to do on Slashdot many moons ago. It's made the internet interesting again.
The doxxing is bad though and that needs to stop before real people get really hurt.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
So when you want a generic shitty OEM laptop that just isn't shitty enough, go open source with it.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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I'm not sure this meets the standard criteria for a laptop these days. That doesn't mean it isn't a valid, useful device, but if you think about the things most people buy a laptop to *do*, they're going to be secondary to the function of this machine. When you say "Laptop" people think "Sophisticated operating system, wide range of available software, media player, useful for software development, gaming machine (maybe), interfaces with wide range of modern portable devices, etc). This sounds like it's got a rather different set of capabilities in mind. Apple probably wouldn't like "HackBook", but it seems to fit better. Reply to This Share http://equipmentbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it