Introduction to Open Source Laptop Project (2023)

resources.altium.com

38 points·rbanffy··9 comments

Open Source Laptop project*

* Requires commercial EDA package that will cost you more than a laptop

Do they publish the results in an open format at lease?

But you have to admit, for those of us who use Altium already, this is a great resource!

Ironically, of the laptop schematics I have collected, none of them seem to have been created in Altium either; they appear to be a mix of Cadence and Mentor, which are even more expensive than Altium.

This looks more like an advert for Altium.

The majority of laptops are made by a few OEMs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laptop_brands_and_manu...

...and their circuitry is extremely similar, being based on the Intel/AMD reference schematics. Anyone who has done computer repair and troubleshooting and seen the various OEM schematics will realise this; they each have their own style, but there are otherwise few differences.

Cant dissagree, a truly open laptop would not need proprietary components. (use a open riscv asic) in addition to kicad ...

https://www.byran.ee/posts/creation

HN Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42797260

Popular in 2023 (116 points, 55 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36148495

FWIW, my requirements for a new laptop, if one of these is missing, I will stick to used Thinkpads:

1. Trackpoint

2. Ability to disable trackpad in BIOS, or better yet, no trackpad.

3. 16:10 screen. 10:9 stinks

4. Nothing from Nvidia

5. Ability to be used with OpenBSD. That means just about any OS should work on it.

6. A standard audio jack to allow me to plug in headphone

7. Just 1 Video Chip (GPU)

No need for bluetooth, but if there I would want to disable it via BIOS

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