Novena: Open Source Hardware laptop launches!

I would like one but I can't figure a real use for one John, that said I know that Bunnie's stuff is cool.

Personaly I'd use the Odroid XU and that iPad display I bought to make a Display Port laptop which would probably be higher spec even though it doesn't have the FPGA.

This is bound to succeed though ....as a fun project it's great.

Sorry John only half read it again, so they did succeed. I must admit I thought they released it a while a go ...DOH

Does any one have one of these unit yet I would be interested to see what projects they put it up to!!!

that said my earlier post stands I think!

Thought I would follow up as my Novena laptop arrived in April.  It's working great!  Here's some photos:

https://plus.google.com/photos/+DrewFustini/albums/6136930117627578369

Thanks to bonnie555 for helping to assemble it.  She was brave enough to do the delicate LCD assembly

Here's a recent update on the software:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena/updates/1598

"Now that we’ve had some time to become familiar with Novena, we’ve seen new and interesting bugs crop up. We’ve spent time fixing these bugs, and the result is a system that is much more stable.

When we shipped Novena, we added a Debian repository hosted at repo.novena.io. To ensure secure updates, we sign all updates pushed to this repository with a key that resides on an air-gapped system. This system will never directly connect to a network, to help ensure that the private key never leaves the signing machine. We keep a log of changes on our wiki."

John,

also reading the next posts I can't avoid to agree 100% with you. Seems that there is a certain number of engineers on the world that like so much to redesign the entire world instead moving a wheel chair of some inches ... Sorry for the crude vision.

Bunnie Huang and Sean Cross have a nice write-up of Novena in the latest IEEE Spectrum: Novena: A Laptop With No Secrets - IEEE Spectrum

They talk about the FPGA a lot, which is good, but they neglect to say that the FPGA is closed source like the GPU and you can't even run Xilinx tools on Novena itself.  I'm not criticizing Novena for selecting the Spartan-6, since it's a very nice part, but IMO an OSHW/SW project should be clear about what parts aren't open.  Also, they missed a fine opportunity to advocate for open FPGA bitstream documentation.

Warning: while most of the comments at the IEEE Spectrum link are nice, some are pretty ugly.  Well, that's the Internet for you

Hi John,

Thanks so much for the link. I really enjoyed reading it, and have bookmarked it. I won't comment on the FPGA bit since you summarized that, but the article

was interesting overall too. Bunnie and Sean didn't go into the reasons why they wanted to have the production run, but trying to get in their mind, I guess they

partly thought there was market (albeit low volume) for an open source laptop with expansion interfaces beyond the norm for a laptop, and it was partly a labour of love too,

and partly to see how to produce things. I'm glad they trail-blazed though.

As you say the offering has critics by the looks of the comments on that post, but their laptop was something in-between a "best guess" given how they thought others would

use it (e.g. having a more generic FPGA subsystem rather than one connected to motor interfaces) and how they wished to use it.

I think most of us would have done things differently, but often that is the case.

I had to present at a conference yesterday, and one of the "best practice" guidelines we'd sucked up from colleagues to present to the audience was that it is highly

worth spending time learning about establishing the minimum viable product (MVP) when you're trying to innovate.

LOL. As engineers it is exciting to want to build, but being super-aware of what customers want is important too.

john,

I have read the article link you posted and Novena is not a new things, I started following this project by when Drew start noticing it. I remain skeptic... As a matter of fact, it sounds to me a circular concept; it is almost impossible - excluding to make the base CPU project from scratch - to have a open hardware device like a laptop with all parts full exposed, circuits schematics etc. They are appreciable because gone beyond the bare assembly another laptop, but most of the choices, especially the FPGA approach are something that needs a computer to manage this computer. But this sounds obvious to me. The point is that the price that this effort has generated IMO is too high respect the real benefits. As Shabaz says, it's a good dream, it's great to see it become reality but I see big difficulties that this product become popular and not a very specific niche jewel.

Enrico