Free laptop novena

^hi-res

A famous hacker, the author of the book “Hacking Xbox” Andrew Huang (Andrew “bunnie” Huang) in June 2012, together with his colleagues, began developing the free Novena laptop on a Freescale iMX6 processor . The idea is for the community to have an open platform, with open documentation and programming guidelines, so that everyone can assemble a laptop / router / etc from the 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 the compatibility of components.

Motherboard design published here .
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The size of the board is 121x150 mm, the height is slightly less than 14 mm (according to the height of the Ethernet connector). These are quite suitable dimensions for the assembly of a compact laptop. If you add a keyboard and 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 yesterday published a report on the development of the project. 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 implement a small upgrade of the motherboard. Most importantly, Spartan 6 LX45 FPGA support has been added, FPGA power has been improved, and a 2-gigabit DDR3 buffer and a 16-bit bus with 800 MT / s bandwidth have been added so that FPGA can be used as a coprocessor for a large number of computational 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

Below is the LVDS-to-DisplayPort adapter.



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