A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

boing
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Because there are certain tradeoffs you have to make to get modularity like this, and they’re not tradeoffs many people are willing to make. The difficulty in cooling a chip inside a PCMCIA card means anything over ~2W TDP is probably not an option. You might be able to get an atom in there, but for the most part you’re looking at ARM SoCs, and that means you’re limiting yourself to linux and its derivatives. Then there’s the issue of the socket/connectors, which can wear/break, and which will take up more space than a traditional motherboard. People want thin and light, but modularity necessarily adds thickness and weight.

There is probably a market for this kind of device, but it’s unlikely to be very big. That’s why they’re not “everywhere”.

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I like this idea.

If I didn’t have so many half complete projects laying around, I could be persuaded to jump on this. But I’m just going to let this one pass

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I’ve been thinking about getting a Pi-Top, which is similar. That being said, 2GB on RAM on this product is great.

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Sorry, the creator was here and was erroneously deleted as a spammer (auto-flags due to repeated link domains from a new user, but the explicit delete action was our bad). We’re working to restore the posts.

Apologies!

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Did I get it wrong! Sorry! Unflagged!

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Assuming that this was an isolated incident the market is really limited to the paranoid (and the people who should be paranoid.) Compared to closed source hardware, the performance is way behind the times.

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You can buy a retina macbook for $65?

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yeah ya did… :slight_smile: doesn’t help unflagging unfortunately, it’s too late, they already too action (without checking). i’m creating a different account as they’re taking too long to restore the one that was deleted, there’s only 2-3 days left on the comments.

indeed it is… but here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. in 6-10 months time i can come out with an upgrade for $50 and people can pop out the old computer card and upgrade the whole thing. $50 for an upgrade vs $500 for a new laptop… which would you prefer? :slight_smile: here’s the link to the hope2016 update, it includes a 3min video that goes over some of the most basic scenarios EOMA68 Computing Devices - Hope Conference 2016 | Crowd Supply

if you really don’t want to get the computer card then consider getting the pass-through card instead. that turns the laptop housing into a NexDock or Superbook or Motorola Atrix Lapdock (without the DRM that’s in the 2nd revision). story on that one’s here: EOMA68 Computing Devices - Pass-through Card | Crowd Supply

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Sorry once again!

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/me shakes fist

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I wish there was a way to use your card with a NexDock or a Superbook as I’m likely to have one of those.

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Which I totally deserve… Never claimed to be perfect! :wink:

[ETA] Also, I wasn’t the only one who marked it as spam (as it was already flagged when I got here), but I did apologize for it…

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:slight_smile: gently, @enso. we get a lot of people comparing mass-volume products against this crowd-funded very early beginnings.

chromebooks and macbooks are made in huge volumes, components are ordered in MOQs of 250,000 and above. automated robotic factories assemble the units. by complete contrast we’re doing around a MOQ of 250… and it will require hand-assembly. much of the pledge committments goes toward NREs (non-recurring expenses) such as “plane flights to taiwan”.

in essence, @Glaurung, you’re pledging to help get the project off the ground, because you like what we’re doing… you’re not “placing an order” - there is no “contract of sale” because crowd-funding is a gift economy.

@Glaurung regarding the belief that this is about “idealogical purity” - it’s most CERTAINLY NOT, i can tell you that RIGHT now. this is an extremely common mistake when people hear the words “FSF”. it wasn’t until i met chris from thinkpenguin that he explained it to me in words that i myself could understand: stuff that chris sells JUST WORKS. there’s none of the '“omg the firmware’s incompatible with the driver”, there’s no “omg my machine’s old i’ll have to throw it out because the manufacturers found it unprofitable to continue to keep the drivers up-to-date” - it JUST WORKS.

so by pre-vetting the hardware so that it’s fully GPL-compliant, you KNOW that it’s just going to keep on working. that’s the decade-long committment that i’ve made to people.

now, it will also happen to be the case that there won’t be any NSA-compromised spying back-door co-processors that we know of, but here’s the thing: SoC vendors usually rely on the high development cost to “lock you in” as an ODM… but the development of the Computer Cards is peanuts… around $1,800 for 5 samples. we can therefore play prisoner’s dilemma with them, playing one SoC vendor off against another for both price, GPL compliance, not having secret backdoor co-processors and much more.

you can’t do that with a standard hermetically-sealed design because it costs around $250,000 to design a laptop, and i can tell you right now it has to be done from scratch. given that the profit margins are so insanely low, this goes a long way towards explaining why ODMs feel like they’re over a barrel and at the mercy of e.g. Intel. that and the threats issued by Microsoft tends to do the trick - “if you sell linux or chromebook laptops we’ll rescind our $10 windows license deal, try selling laptops in today’s market when the windows license cost ya $75 har har”. yes this really does happen.

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course there is - the NexDock has HDMI and USB inputs; the EOMA68-A20 has… HDMI and USB-OTG outputs, right there on the user-facing end of the Card :slight_smile:

no worries man. the webmasters should have done a proper check

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i think this was where i was when the comments were deleted… basic summary, this is nothing like the pi-top. a point-for-point comparison (“is it a libre project”, “have they released the CAD and SCH files”, “have they kept their promises or have any track record of committment which can be evaluated publicly”) is, i’m sorry to say, a major indictment of the pi-top team as the answer is “no” every time. people who got one say it’s awful: keyboard’s bad, and it’s about 1.25in thick when closed because it has to fit a 15mm high PCB inside it. by contrast this 15.6in laptop is i think 22mm high when closed? anyway i don’t want to embarrass the pi-top team because the fact that you can fit electronics experiments inside it is great, and it’s a good (if hard) lesson for people to be able to learn from, next to the openmoko, openpandora, ben nanonote and many others.

regarding the 2GB RAM, we’ll have Computer Cards over the next decade that do a lot more than that. it’s just going to take the fabless semi companies a while to wake up. either that or we fund the creation of a new SoC ourselves. we’ll be able to do that for around $USD 5-10m.

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/me smacks head

Excellent. I pre-ordered a unit and the desk case yesterday. I actually have a 3D printer (or five), a lathe, and a CNC mill so I figure I’ll be making housings of my own at some point.

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yes. MicroHDMI output.

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the A20 maxes out at 2.5 watts: we know that there’s no heatsink needed. the space is so tight that the SoC is in direct contact with the stainless steel case, which is in turn in direct contact with the aluminium from the keyboard.

at around 3.5 watts we can use the exact same graphite heatspreader paper that’s used in mobile phones. graphite has extraordinarily high thermal conductivity. at up to 4.5 watts we can flood the case with thermal gel and seal it.

when they stop doing processors with the spying backdoor co-processor… yes :slight_smile:

and MIPS. i can live with chrome, android, FreeBSD, l4linux, l4android and so on.

that’s why i re-used PCMCIA because it’s designed for continuous insert/remove. the manufacturers typically quote something like 25,000 insertions during testing.

[quote] and which will take up more space than a traditional motherboard.
[/quote]

lucky this isn’t a traditional motherboard, then, eh? :slight_smile:

[quote] People want thin and light, but modularity necessarily adds thickness and weight.
[/quote]

that’s why i’m not focussing on the smartphone market… yet. the laptop’s around 22mm thick, which is pretty damn good for a 15.6in. the microdesktop is about the same.

the computer cards are 40 grams, and the laptop’s 1.1kg. weight’s not as much of a problem when you go ultra-low-power, as you get mass decompounding. no heatsinks, no heat pipes, no hard drives… all that weight falls away.

i’ve been at this for 5 years, chipandre - i’ve had time to think about these things, and how to get there based on the available budget.

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cool! well if you would like to release the CAD files as an open project do get in touch on the arm-netbooks mailing list, that’d be really awesome. The arm-netbook Archives