The most excellent Bunnie has blogged on MAKE about his Open Source laptop project:
Building an Open Source Laptop | MAKE
About a year and a half ago, I engaged on an admittedly quixotic project to build my own laptop. By I, I mean we, namely Sean “xobs” Cross and me,bunnie [...] Before this project, I had never designed with Gigabit Ethernet (RGMII), SATA, PCI-express, DDR3, gas gauges, eDP, or even a power converter capable of handling 35 watts [...] Building my own laptop would be a great way for me to stretch my legs a bit without the cost and schedule constraints normally associated with commercial projects.
The final bit of motivation is my passion for open hardware. I’m a big fan of opening up the blueprints for the hardware you run – if you can’t hack it, you don’t own it.
Here's the design files:
Novena Main Page - Studio Kousagi Wiki
and I'm sure it will excite some here that it also has a FPGA:
The machine must be useful as a hardware hacking platform. This drives the rather unique inclusion of an FPGA into the mainboard.
from the wiki page above:
Spartan-6 CSG324-packaged FPGA — has several interfaces to the CPU, including a 2Gbit/s (peak) RAM-like bus — for your bitcoin mining needs. Or whatever else you might want to toss in an FPGA.
It was also interesting to learn from Bunnie's blog post why he choose the Freescale i.MX6 quad core processor:
Freescale is the only SoC vendor in this performance class where you can simply go to their website, click a link, and download a mostly complete 6,000-page programming manual. It’s a ballsy move on their part and I commend them for the effort.
You can follow the project on Twitter: https://twitter.com/novenakosagi
cheers,
drew
