Open Source Laptop

LukasH · May 8, 2023

Hey everyone,

It´s my first post here on this forum, I look forward to some exciting discussions

I wanted to share a project with you that I´ve been working on for a few months now. I thought there might be some tech enthusiastic people on here who are interested in some of the topics I´m looking into for my project.

The project I´m working on is designing a fully open hardware thin and light 13” laptop from scratch. The goal of this project is to create an open source product that is easy to repair/upgrade and that can be used as a starting point for anyone who would like to design something similar. (or would just like to look into how this system is designed)

I´m pretty early in the design phase so there are still a lot of unknowns I have to figure out. What I already have is 90% of the preliminary CAD model and some simple PCBs for the webcam and some adapter boards for the display panel I would like to use.

Over the last few months I´ve been focusing on designing the enclosure as a starting point. For that I´ve run quite a few thermal simulations, elasticity simulations and magnetic simulations. Since this will be an open hardware project I though it would be fitting to perform all these simulations with open source software as well.

This is how the final system should look like:

The display is 3:4 13,5" panel from BOE with 2256x1504 resolution. For the first prototype I´m not looking into implementing a touch screen to keep the complexity of the display assembly manageable.

Currently I´m already prototyping the display assembly:

The display assembly is still missing the cover glass at the moment which is currently in prototype production. Also missing is the PCB containing the webcam, microphones and touch sensors. The design is ready and I will probably get the first prototypes manufactured in the next few weeks:

For the laptop body itself I´m planning to get a fully machined aluminum body manufactured. The keyboard will be a mechanical keyboard with low profile kailh switches. The air intake and hot air output for the SoC heatsink will be on the side of the laptop in order not to obstruct the airflow when the laptop is placed on the lap or a soft surface.

The question of the processor Is something I´m still working on at the moment. At the start of the project I though about going ARM for availability reasons. There are some ARM processors out there with publicly available datasheets, which would make the open hardware aspect much easier. Unfortunately the processing power of these SoCs just isn´t sufficient for such a project. Ideally I would like to use a newer Ryzen SoC, but I´m not sure yet if that will be an option under the open hardware nature of this project.

In the early phase of this project I´ve designed a small ARM system on module for this system, but I scrapped that approach.

There is a lot more that I want to tell you about my project. (In a lot more sensible order also ) Tell me if some of you out there are interested in such a project. If so I´ll start a small documentation series here

Cheers

Lukas