Free Novena Laptop

^hi-res

Well ^- known hacker, author of the book “Hacking Xbox” Andrew Huang (June “Andrew bunnie” Huang) in June 2012, along with colleagues began developing a free laptop Novena processor Freescale iMX6 . The idea is that the community has an open platform, with open documentation and programming guidelines, so that everyone can assemble a laptop / router / etc from their components. to your taste, with any keyboard, body and screen size.

In December 2012, the author received the first samples of motherboards for further testing of component compatibility.

The design of the motherboard is published here .

The size of the board is 121x150 mm, the height is slightly less than 14 mm (along the height of the Ethernet connector). These are quite suitable dimensions for assembling a compact laptop. If you add a keyboard and a case, then the thickness of the laptop will be around 24 mm.

In the illustration, the motherboard is rotated 90 ° counterclockwise. Ports should be on the right, not the bottom.





A year after the start of development, Andrew Huang published a project development report yesterday . In short, the laptop is already working, along with a retina display and other peripherals.



You can follow the progress of the repository updates .

Since the last review, the developers decided to carry out a small upgrade of the motherboard. Most importantly, Spartan 6 LX45 FPGA support has been added, FPGA power supply has been improved, and a 2-gigabyte DDR3 buffer and a 16-bit bus with a bandwidth of 800 MT / s have been added so that FPGA can be used as a coprocessor for a large number of computing tasks.



An adapter has been developed for connecting the LG LP129QE retina display with a size of 12.85 ″, 2560 × 1700 pixels (239ppi).


^hi-res

The LVDS-to-DisplayPort adapter is shown below.



Many on the forums say they would like to use Novena as an advanced router. This is what the motherboard looks like in the “for router” case. For a scale near 2.5-inch HDD.