Congratulations Byran, this is really impressive work!

This seems to list some components multiple times in a versioned way, did I get it right that this is rather a whole list of components you&#x27;ve bought while working on this project rather than the final list of the components needed to assemble the notebook you&#x27;ve built?

Thanks for the question. I&#x27;m working on compiling the BOM in these few days. A preliminary R&amp;D BOM is here (apologies, it&#x27;s in Google Sheets): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;17arbJvPqW6koqEJwAzne7z5z2sndyQx2O3cI5NKfjhY&#x2F;edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;17arbJvPqW6koqEJwAzne...</a>

Holy fuckPeople like Byran live amongst usMaking their own laptops but from SCRATCHImagine how good this man’s pasta carbonara tastes

Thanks! Around $300 total from JLCCNC with 6061 aluminum, bead blasting, and matte black anodization (top, midplate, bottom).

nice work!how much was it to get the case milled?

Truly appreciate it. I spent many weeks afterwards documenting the steps as thoroughly as I could. My email&#x27;s on the site if anyone needs to reach out, as well. :)

well done, thanks for documenting and congratulations on completing the project!

Thanks for your suggestions and criticism! Much appreciated. Which aspect of it (aside from the SoM, which I admittedly do not have the R&amp;D to make in this timescale) isn&#x27;t open-source? I&#x27;d love to hear your thoughts. The Novena and Reform are amazing pieces of engineering, but I believe they sacrifice the portability and looks for repairability which some people certainly prefer. I wanted to aim for something that a non-technical consumer might look and say &quot;hmm, nice laptop!&quot; and not think it came out of the matrix or built it myself.In terms of college, still waiting :)

Very nice. Wish there were faster SOMs than the 3588 but maybe in a year or two.Looks like an MIT admissions portfolio project. Don’t know if it fits the uniqueness category for it but I guess the quality of the end product makes it good enough.Admittedly this isn’t fully open source like the Novena or the Reform but I doubt adcomms care. I just wish I was rich enough and skilled enough to be able to spend $4.5k on a neat project like this.

Sick! Finally someone posting something that puts the “hacker” in HN.Love the parts research you did.

Maybe, depending on reception! I geared it so it could be manufactured at a semi-small scale. Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t have the capacity to make them myself :(. Thank you for the interest!

Not to take anything away from this amazing achievement, but if you want a similar open-source laptop, also based on an RK3588, that will actually be manufactured and sold, check out the MNT Reform Next: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;mnt&#x2F;mnt-reform-next" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;mnt&#x2F;mnt-reform-next</a>

VERY impressive. the laptop looks great. wish you could manufacture and sell the thing, i&#x27;d consider one :)

We discussed wave functions, probability, fermions&#x2F;bosons, did calculations for particle in a box, the Schrödinger model, and went just up to deriving the hydrogen atom. Nothing super fancy, but it was one heck of an experience!

Some do- He thanks Phillips Exeter at the bottom of the project page, which is a very fancy private highschool, probably the best in the US.

Not all high schools but the US has some schools which allow you to take very advanced material &#x2F; even get a head start on your college credits.

We had a cursory introduction at least about 15 years ago in Germany, it&#x27;s not that far off.

It&#x27;s more possible than you&#x27;d think! The options are basically:- Go to a fancy private school like Phillips Exeter- Really luck out and get into a great public STEM magnet school- Homeschool and take private classes &#x2F; have very smart parents

In the high school in Poland I attended, I lucked into being in a class with a university TA assigned as physics teacher, and he did manage to sneak in QM - more-less the same stuff as &#x27;Hello9999901 listed in their reply.(He also taught us differentiation in the first semester, and basic integrals in the second, because as he said, you cannot learn physics properly without those tools. This annoyed the heck out of our math teacher; she ended up deciding that, if we&#x27;re learning this anyway, we might as well learn it properly - and gave us a much heavier intro to calculus in the last months of the last year.)

You don’t study basics of QM in your high schools?

The USA has some great schools. OP goes to Phillips Exeter Academy, which is an exclusive private school that ranks among the best high schools in the country.

You study quantum mechanics in High School in the USA?

Thanks! I&#x27;ve been considering it (or enough detailed instructions to build one) since starting the project. I need to get a working model first though ;)

We are going full circle, Woz will be proud.

This is incredible work for anyone, let alone a high schooler. Seriously impressive!I hope this turns into something I can buy (maybe a diy kit), in the future!

Okay, I&#x27;ll help him humble brag:Bryan is in his last year of high school.&lt;&#x2F;end&gt;Keep building!

I&#x27;d love to see one; hope to see that day come!!

This is fantastic! I hope to follow in your footsteps as soon as a decent RISC-V board can supplant that RK3588.

This is so, so cool. Reminds me of Clockwork Pi stuff. Thanks for sharing :)

If you keep this idea alive (and I hope you do!), you might consider shrinking the keyboard battery and designing its docking configuration so that it automatically charges from the main battery when stored in the laptop. A 3 month keyboard battery capacity seems sort of excessive when its mechanically part of a machine that charges daily.I think one of the limitations to the keyboard concept you have is that it complicates using the laptop base as a stand for the screen in a tablet configuration. Outside of tablets with fully detachable keyboards (e.g. the Surface or the iPad pro), I don&#x27;t think anybody has a good design for that. Was a touchscreen ever a consideration for stretch goals or design for expansion?

Hey! Thank you for the question. For sure, it&#x27;s not a polished product and I don&#x27;t mean for it to be. It works surprisingly well. (I&#x27;ve used it as my daily driver for school)
With college apps and school work, the time was tight. I&#x27;d say that was the most limiting. Of course, resource and skill played its role.
I did consider flex PCBs, but I didn&#x27;t have the time to follow through with all the ambitions (i also wanted an FOC input sigh).I&#x27;m honored that you think my keyboard implementation is nice! I put a lot of thought into it — truly. Oh btw the keyboard works just as well as a solo device. I&#x27;ve used the keyboard more than the computer in some ways. Thanks!

Hmmm. That&#x27;s also an interesting solution to the same problem. Although honestly, the scenario where I want to have a removable keyboard, I&#x27;m likely using an external display (probably a hotel TV), and a small wireless mouse is a lot easier to transport than a keyboard (and more ergonomic than a keyboard small enough for transport) so the extra screen and trackpad are sort of lost on me.

Regarding a laptop with a removable wireless keyboard, ZenBook Duo has that, although the touchpad is removed with the keyboard.It also has two screens and its own stand, I use it as my travel machine.

Also loved the detachable keyboard (which has me fantasize about a detachable screen as well + external hdmi&#x2F;displayport, as I hate the working positions I end up in with a laptop, so it&#x27;d be nice to be able to get a more comfortable setup in a hotel room etc. that still packages up to a laptop.

This is really cool!There are some obvious next steps for improving the polish on this, would you say you were more resource constrained, time constrained, or skill constrained?For instance, did you put any thought into making flex PCBs to make the cable routing easier?I also think the concept of a laptop with a removable wireless keyboard is brilliant, and I think your implementation is a lot cleaner than e.g. the Surface or the iPad&#x27;s case-keyboards. If I had a laptop that did that, it would be my go-to travel machine. One less thing to cart around.

Genuinely incredible work. Looking forward to seeing what other cool projects you do in the future.

Thank you so much! If you&#x27;d like to discuss further, please let me know! My email is in the website. I have a Framework 16 and have tons of ideas. Never got around to it though. (I also burned a few screens, and had 3 as backup haha).

I actually spent quite some time trying to build a custom driver for a custom screen for my Framework 13, only to burn the screen driver.Very impressed by what you have done here. Kudos to you on achieving designing and building a whole laptop!

Very impressive work, and also nice video editing. Congrats.

&gt; Then, the housing is 1mm past the USB-C connector.Yes, this is often the case but sometimes the USB-C connectors are on the same side of the board where you also need to plug in some cables that you need internally (maybe even other USB devices). Thus the option of letting an USB-C port stick out on one side of the enclosure is not always available.&gt; I agree with USB extension cables concerns too! The error would increase depending on the quality (impedance, power, etc.)Yes, and the user of your device (who doesn&#x27;t see the internal cable) will assume that they can plug in their own cable, so you&#x27;ll have two cables.

It&#x27;s almost standard to have the USB-C have extra wiggle-room (around 1mm or so). Then, the housing is 1mm past the USB-C connector. That&#x27;s how the casings are made so that when you stick the connector in, it&#x27;s flush or nearly so.I agree with USB extension cables concerns too! The error would increase depending on the quality (impedance, power, etc.)

I&#x27;m curious how the USB-C connectors are made to the outside of the enclosure.What I&#x27;ve found is that it&#x27;s a bad idea to use USB extension cables; these can introduce bit errors if e.g. you copy large amounts of data (order of terabytes). It&#x27;s much better to insert a USB drive directly into a carrier board, but this is not always physically possible.

Truly appreciate it thank you so much!! I poured my life and soul into this haha.

This is one of those special HN posts that demonstrates outsized excellence on the author&#x27;s behalf. Watched the video and I&#x27;m very impressed.

Back in my day, I thought spending $50 in wood shop was rough.

Hanging around 5 grand. Unfortunately the R&amp;D process was rough! The R&amp;D BOM is linked below, feel free to take a look. If you were to build it, I&#x27;d estimate it costing around 1500 dollars (or less).

Amazin! what&#x27;s the total cost for you?

Wow. Precisely what I have been looking for. This is great. And mind 2 is even better.

Thanks! Have you taken a look at the Khadas Mind [1]? Super similar to what you&#x27;re talking about with the handheld PC.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.khadas.com&#x2F;product-page&#x2F;mind" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.khadas.com&#x2F;product-page&#x2F;mind</a>

Looks good. Could be a small step to my vision for a dock dependent palm sized pc with high powered cpu connected by a single USB C with no other ports except for micro sd. And backed up by a mini battery for power stability on low watt chargers.

&gt; from past work, like the MUREX Ethernet SwitchJust looked it up... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40694254">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40694254</a> for those who want a direct link.Jesus. Wish I had had even a fraction your talent at that age. Most impressive.

Thank you so much — yes, that was the hardest part of this entire project! I spent 2 months getting eDP working (second PCB thankfully).I had the honor of learning high speed signaling from the best. I met some super cool people from Silicon Valley and research universities (from past work, like the MUREX Ethernet Switch). The ZMK Firmware community too!

Holy. That&#x27;s an achievement very few people can claim. Wonder if HN has a &quot;hall of fame&quot;, a worthy entry.You did the smart thing there with the SoM (for the uninitiated: power sequencing to individual parts of an SoC and its external components is an epic hassle to get right and that&#x27;s assuming you actually have proper documentation - without it it&#x27;s an utter pain), but how in hell did you get the high frequency stuff working out on what was likely your first or second try? This is IMHO where your work really shines.USB-C, DisplayPort (at 4K to boot) and PCIe at modern speeds are all but black magic to most, this isn&#x27;t digital any more, this is good old analog circuitry and physics at work that most people don&#x27;t even learn in university any more.

Thank you so much! The story behind the laptop was quite interesting — my friends and I were going to an athletics event far away, and he brought up the idea that I should make a laptop for my senior project as a joke (our school offers 1 free class for a &quot;project&quot;, graciously funded by the school). I said &quot;hell yeah.&quot; That&#x27;s pretty much how this came to be, college didn&#x27;t play much of a role imho. And best of luck studying physics!

my guess is when doing college applications, you figured you had to do something special to get into a good college, so you decided to do this lolDoesn&#x27;t matter why, pretty sick. I&#x27;m studying physics myself, so its pretty inspiring to see you do this

Hey Bryan, great work and very inspiring. This has me meta curious about how a project like this is possible. Besides the support from your school, I imagine that your parents have been a big part of your success?

At which point was the mental map created within Obsidion and did you really need it?You are clearly a very clever person and you do not need a web app wiggly graph thingie to throw ideas together.There&#x27;s no need to gild a lily!Please keep the faith - I love that you are focussed on being altruistic and sharing your skills to the benefit of everyone.Thank you.

My hat is off to you, good sir. Way off. This is an unbelievable accomplishment, doubly so given that you&#x27;re still in high school (!!!), triple-so given the time you did it in, quadruple-so given that you did it all yourself, etc etc etc.I was reading this over thinking &quot;this guy should be working for Framework&quot;. It would be a total win-win.

Really amazing and impressive work. And also an excellent resource for future explorers.One thing I didn&#x27;t see mentioned in the video is the total cost of all the materials to complete one laptop not including all the experimentation cost. I&#x27;d be super curious about that.

Thank you so much! For certain; goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble and knowledge without goodness is dangerous.It was a truly difficult undertaking! I was ready to quit at so many moments, but I always think about the final mission of sharing this little piece of knowledge with the world. :)

Byran... This is seriously impressive. You are very blessed to be so capable in so many disciplines -- design, hardware, software, storytelling. It is a massively complicated undertaking, and you executed in style. Nice work, and remember to use your formidable powers for good!

I’m pretty sure it’d take me 7 hard years of studying electronics &#x2F; hardware &#x2F; linux to get his level

Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t get into MIT, and then I see people like this exist

It might be a stupidly specific question, but may I ask what is the screen resolution and how many FPS you got? I am asking because I&#x27;ve been considering buying an Orange PI with RK3588 for gaming purposes.

I played Minecraft (epic gaming) with friends for a few hours, no problem! The massive heat capacity of the copper + heatpipe + active fan is good enough.

I’d like to follow up to see how it handles heat or excessive heat if any

Thank you so, so much! You phrased it so well. The moments of desperation really hit you hard. I have uncountably many loose ends, but oh well, bad engineering :(. Honored that HN thinks I&#x27;m a hacker :)

Congratulations! From someone who does mixed electronics+mechanical design: this is hard. There are moments of desperation where you realize that everything depends on everything else, and there is no way to achieve all of your design goals. You then have to realize that engineering is all about compromises, and move on, compromising — but this is very difficult. It&#x27;s easy to get bogged down in details and dependencies and never finish the project.It&#x27;s very impressive work and it makes me so happy to see real hacker news on HN. This is real hacking.

Oh my god! Jeff — huge fan and subscriber!! Thank you for your words of encouragement :). Your videos have been a huge source of inspiration for me.

Always fun to read an article like this, for humility&#x27;s sake.Wow! And I&#x27;m guessing if he attempts a 2nd edition, it&#x27;ll probably be even thinner, lighter, and faster!

This is really cool ! Kudos for getting this started. I wonder if initiatives such as one laptop per child could have been effective with this kind of approach. Eitherway I hope this project goes along way as I could see its application not only at home but also in developing nations.

Haha I wish, but no. Just surname coincidence.

Wow this is fantastic, great job! I hope this heralds a new era of HW engineering.P.S. @Hello9999901 any relation to &quot;Bunnie&quot; Huang?

This is what the internet was invented for.

Holly crap. This man is the messiah of tech. Keep going my guy. That is so impressive. I look forward to what you do next.

Man!! This is sooo impressive. I did a little research on making my own motherboard (not even for a laptop) and didn’t get anywhere nearly as far.I just want to throw money at you! We need an open source laptop!!

There was a very old ThinkPad design that allowed the keyboard to take more space than the width of the laptop, but that was also bad old non-split layoutBut at least not wasting existing left&#x2F; right side space and having a gap in the middle instead would be a nice startOr maybe even get to the best of the portable&#x2F;non-portable worlds: since the keyboard is wireless, you could detach 2 halves of the keyboard and place them on a desk at ergonomic shoulder distanceAnd this would allow you to also ergonomically position the laptop itself for a better screen position - vertical, just like your desktop monitorThinkPad: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;RRHFi_l9UR0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;RRHFi_l9UR0</a>

That&#x27;s a sick idea too! Wouldn&#x27;t be too hard. I&#x27;ll keep that in mind never thought of it before even though I&#x27;ve used my fair share.

Have you thought about finally adding a split ergonomic keyboard to a laptop instead of the standard slab?

It looks like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;mnt&#x2F;mnt-reform-next" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;mnt&#x2F;mnt-reform-next</a> and the anyon_e use the same SoC and similar parts (e.g. Cherry MX ULP switches). I wonder how much of that is they&#x27;re the only parts that would be put in such laptops?

More suited to working with MNT Research[0] which makes actual certified open source hardware[1] :)[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mntre.com&#x2F;reform.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mntre.com&#x2F;reform.html</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;certification.oshwa.org&#x2F;de000017.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;certification.oshwa.org&#x2F;de000017.html</a>

Framework team, hire this guy, when it&#x27;s legal :)

Tip from an experienced EE: try to avoid middle-men recruiters at all cost. Go straight to the company you want to work for. Or better yet in your case: start your own company :p

Thank you so much for the heartfelt advice! I&#x27;ll keep that close to heart :)

This is crazy. Hats off to you. My guess is you&#x27;ll have recruiters knocking on your door yesterday, trying to grab you before the next one does. Whatever you do, don&#x27;t let your talents go to waste (corporations can do that), and think about your long term success, not whatever they dangle in front of you for the short term. You&#x27;re going places.

Thank you! Yup, Raspberry Pi&#x27;s great an all, but the RK3588&#x27;s performance is king (and RPi would&#x27;ve also saved me many nights of head-banging at the software).

I clicked through dreading that it&#x27;s got a Raspberry Pi at its core, but no, RK3588 (same as MNT is using now)!  Very nice.  Ultra kudos for making it truly open source.  Great work!! &lt;3

came here to shit on this project, that there was no way it was open source down to the ME, like a raptor or framework computer. absolutely required IMO to be considered open source.i didn&#x27;t find any firwmware in the repo (didn&#x27;t look exhaustively) but I did find that the SoC this is based on is supported by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;edk2-porting&#x2F;edk2-rk3588">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;edk2-porting&#x2F;edk2-rk3588</a> .AFAICT the azoteq trackpad has proprietary firmware, so if that&#x27;s true then i won&#x27;t call this laptop fully open source. but from a practical perspective, i am much less worried about that then the boot path.love the keyboard, wish i could test drive it!so instead, i was left very, very impressed!

This is a great example of why people should not be afraid to be bold.

Hey Nirav, super super honored that you saw this! I&#x27;ve always looked up to you guys for inspiration and guidance. Thank you for the offer! Although I probably won&#x27;t be mass-producing open-source laptops like you (i have a framework 16!), I would love to meet you. Would that be possible?

Hi Nirav, any plans to start Framework in India?

Super impressive, and awesome to see that you were able to use Framework Laptop hinges.  Let me know if you need more.  We have a ton of remaining 3.3kg ones!

This may be the coolest thing I’ve seen this year. Wait, it’s January? This may be the coolest thing I’ve seen this year and last.And possibly the year before.Well, well done. Good luck to you!

not only that, you can use this laptop to _play_ factorio!

If you can do something like this, then you&#x27;d be great at Factorio! :)On a less joking note, I wonder if I&#x27;m decent at Factorio, I could learn this.

Hey you didn’t mine the rare earth minerals! This ain’t really from scratch!Just joking, incredibly impressive!

Mechanical what? The keys? There are people who have had the same keyboard for 30 years. You don&#x27;t have to design things to be disposable junk.That&#x27;s even part of the advantage. If you want a higher quality chassis made of rubber-padded metal that can survive being dropped off a table then you&#x27;d only have to buy it once.

I think my laptops have been split between mechanical and hardware EOL. I don&#x27;t think the mechanicals would ever go for two lifetimes. But I actually take mine around places and am a little clumsy.

I&#x27;ve long been disappointed that we&#x27;ve never really gotten standard laptops, in the way that there are ATX standard desktops.The laptop form factor hasn&#x27;t really changed in decades. It&#x27;s a rectangle with a screen in the lid and a keyboard in the base. Below the keyboard is a battery and a system board. The battery has to be replaced when it wears out and the system board when it becomes obsolete, but then why aren&#x27;t they both fungible parts? If you take any arbitrary ATX PC from many years ago, you can replace the system board&#x2F;CPU&#x2F;memory&#x2F;storage with modern ones and carry on using the same chassis, screen, power supply and keyboard provided they meet the required specs for the new parts (and they often do).So why can&#x27;t I do this with the average laptop, instead of having to replace $200-$300 worth of perfectly good parts or more each time I want an upgrade?

Congratulations, this is awesome. I worked on medical devices where I did both hardware and software and it is really hard. I wish you the best and I really hope you&#x27;ll continue to use your skills for good and open products.

Just skimmed the YouTube video and I&#x27;m blown away as well ... anytime my ego needs to get checked, I just scroll through HN posts. Truly impressive

Bryan, thanks for publishing, this is great work. I&#x27;m curious if this this build could fit and swap a 13.3 E-ink screen with display board. Some open source hardware synergy with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Modos-Labs&#x2F;Glider&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Modos-Labs&#x2F;Glider&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main</a>

Besides the enormous effort, what did the part cost?

So how long is the trip to Earth from your home planet? And do you plan on staying a while or are you just here for 6 months to humiliate us with your superintelligence?

aight, mate. that&#x27;s definitely impressive. no, not only impressive, i believe it can help you land a great job somewhere.

This is one of the coolest projects I&#x27;ve seen here in a long time. Kudos! Your dedication to completion is admirable.

An amazing challenge you set for yourself and pulled it off in 7 months is admirable, commendable and exceptional.How much did it cost to make this open-source laptop?
My wild guess is it&#x27;s around $500-750.

I wish I had your talent, that’s impressive! And it took you 6 months only.

I suspect that utmost performance was not the main focus of the project. Nevertheless, the complexity of the project would not be different if a different CoM was to be adopted. Even creating a custom CoM doesn&#x27;t seem that much more complicated, as the daughter board is as complicated since it already needs to handle high-frequency traces as well. Super impressive project!

There&#x27;s a way to phrase this comment better, which reflects sadness on the facts of the market, and isn&#x27;t a kind of attack on the author.

&gt; A highly integrated, high end, open source laptop.Not sure what’s meant by “high end” here. Performance is a rather important aspect, and the RK3588 this uses will make it slower than almost every laptop on the market. Practically all are twice as fast (both single- and multi-core), most are 3–5× multi-core, and the best approach 7× (paired with 2.5× single-core).Looking at Lenovo India, they sell three laptops that are slower multi-core and maybe slower single-core (running Celeron N4020 or Athlon Silver 7120U); after that, they’re all at least twice as fast, in both single- and multi-core benchmarks.(I’m simplifying to PassMark’s single-&#x2F;multi-core scores, using &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;cpu.php?cpu=Rockchip+RK3588&amp;id=4906" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;cpu.php?cpu=Rockchip+RK3588&amp;id=...</a>&gt; and such.)From &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.byran.ee&#x2F;posts&#x2F;creation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.byran.ee&#x2F;posts&#x2F;creation</a>&gt;: “In many aspects, the Rockchip RK3588 is the fastest consumer-procurable chip on the market.” As someone not involved in these spaces, this was my vague impression, but it still ends up disappointing if you simply can’t get good performance for a project like this because only bigger companies can buy the better-performance things. It’s an extremely impressive project, but unfortunately will be rendered not viable for many—probably most—people for this one reason. That makes me sad. I wish they’d sell us the good stuff.

A huge congratulations to Bryan, a wonderful achievement and a remarkable result! Keep it up Bryan!It&#x27;s lovely to see HN so nice and friendly, keep it up guys!

Most of the older LED display have standard 30 pin or 40 pin connection. Lacking standard is keyboard connectors. Most standard are battery and fans.Maybe laptop should have two layers or parts.One for Motherboard and memory and another for connectors, fans, power supply, battery etc. Then we can have more standard even if a little thicker.

A seriously impressive piece of work, especially only in 6 months. Bravo! :)

I think 32 is the limit for the motherboard.

No hardware sell like hot cakes relative to the pain and cost incurred.

Because it&#x27;s the eco-system for software, hardware, firmware, drivers, books, documentation, blogs, papers, training modules, etc. It&#x27;s the same reasons Nvidia thriving for ML&#x2F;AI while the rest are playing catch up.

&gt; Personally I&#x27;m a bit disappointed that it&#x27;s based on Rockchip.Why would you?You mentioned Raspberry where, compared to the competition, you pay more for the name while they deliver even the same capabilities or more bang for the buck...
Don&#x27;t get me wrong. Huge Raspi fan here. I have 3 models laying around here, because they are the easiest to purchase. But the competition is not to be overlooked.Also, aren&#x27;t the compute modules strandarized or compatible? So it should be interchangeable, no?

Anyone know the amount of RAM available for the laptop?Personally I&#x27;m a bit disappointed that it&#x27;s based on Rockchip.If someone can come up with low cost open source laptop with RPi compute module 5 with 16GB RAM I think it will selling like hot cakes given the software and hardware eco-system that exist round RPi [1]. It just that the compute module has yet to come with 16GB RAM unlike the normal RPi 5 but it will probably just around the corner [2].[1] Compute Module 5:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.raspberrypi.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;compute-module-5&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.raspberrypi.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;compute-module-5&#x2F;</a>[2] New 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120 (191 comments):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42642873">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42642873</a>

Yeah I did some crazy things when I was in school. Had so much time.

Yeah, that&#x27;s a given. Everyone has only 24h of time per day. And everyone has different struggles.This is an incredible achievement. And i really don&#x27;t like, that your comment invited other people to jump onboard &amp; comment in a way belittling the achievements– even if just implicitly, to make themselves feel better why a high-schooler is doing things like that.If all that was really the main driver, HN frontpage should be flooded with projects made by high-schoolers. But it is not. It might be contributing factor.Btw: Funnily enough, i would expect these type of excuses &amp; self-comforting negativity from high-schoolers.

And money for parts and tools :-)  
Also many in high school (at least here i Denmark) have jobs after school.

Don&#x27;t underestimate the amount of knowledge you don&#x27;t have to perfect things. I remember building scheduling software in PHP in high school, because I just fixed problem after problem, and I was not limited by any form of knowledge. If I&#x27;d have to do it again, I&#x27;d be perfecting the architecture, refactoring everything every other week...

tbqh, I vividly remember rolling my eyes in high school when older people would say: &quot;don&#x27;t squander the free time you have; you&#x27;ll wish you had it back someday...&quot; and while I don&#x27;t outright regret doing kid stuff and squandering the free time in high school as kids do, some days those sentiments ring out more true than others; today being one of them after seeing this video.Good job, kid

And the time. Don&#x27;t underestimate the amount of free time people have when they&#x27;re in high school (vs when you have a family &#x2F; intense job).Having said that, even with unlimited time this is such an awesome achievement and really shows the dedication. Well done!

Probably not a lot, kids who have the grit to work on projects like this are the ones most likely to succeed academically

I sometimes wonder how many talented engineers top colleges are rejecting because they were busy working on real engineering projects like this than academics and test scores.

The words &quot;senior project&quot;. Which, fair enough, might mean different things in different parts of the world.

He is a high school senior right now. He is one of my closes classmates and really devoted to such projects. It&#x27;s mind blowing

Bear in mind he&#x27;s &quot;CEO&quot; of the underwater MATE ROV team at Phillips Exeter Academy, and if you scroll down a bit, it says that Phillips Exeter Academy is giving him a high school diploma.

This guy is in high school yet has been CEO and what not according to his LinkedIn?What makes you think he is in high school

...back in the day we had this partner who emigrated from undisclosed_balkan_country to the USA in the 90s. 20 years later his daugther in her teens gets $20k funding from the school principal, for her pet fashion project (not even STEM!). Her school is not even a top one, just a private school somewhere in major USA city.On the contrary, even though we&#x27;ve had top marks in the top math school in the same country, we&#x27;d never ever hoped to get even $200 for a project. Were we good enough to build a computer - of course, it&#x27;s not that hard once you get the basics, and once you&#x27;ve done x86 assembly in your early teens. But it was just impossible to even think about spending the money, or loosing them per se.Exeter Philips school has quote &quot;700 acres, 147 buildings, the world&#x27;s largest high school library&quot;. And I&#x27;m sure also lots of engineering development facilities where you can actually get your hands dirty. I can imagine the progress had I found myself there by some miracle. This kid is absolute winner to be in it, but I bet his parents must have also won the lottery ticket, one way or another, cause UK education is crazy expensive.Now, in order to not make this story super sad, let&#x27;s admit that, even though we as schoolkids didn&#x27;t have access to such campus and funding, by last year in school I could track music with FT2; build Linux kernel and write ASM&#x2F;C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Perl; operated a BBS; debugged the IE9 source with VXDs and all; took part in writing two demoscene productions, that we still proud of; and finally, but not lest being a bunch of smart kinds in their 20s we started a hosting company in 1998(or &#x27;99) which soon handled the amount of traffic which equaled that of the whole country. This all with no GPTs, no Google searches, not even forums that much back then. So of course, it matters, that you are not a dumbass, after all.But nobody ever gave us the security to pursue dreams the way this kid does. And I&#x27;m absolutely convinced we could&#x27;ve put together a laptop or something along the line. I say put together, because a lot of these parts are easily available now, one click away, nothing like what it was back in the day. He&#x27;s not producing the chips, neither the screen, neither putting elements together, but the chassis and kbd, and does some wiring. Of course - fascinating for a teenager to do, but you see, teenagers are not so stupid, and never were. And those in top schools are particularly bright and outpace many adults in many areas. From the images I can tell this is a school projects, so perhaps it took also a little mentoring to do it.This always make me think about two things - it absolutely matters which school you are lucky to have gone to; and very likely all talent is lost soon after high-school, because... reasons.

Yeah... Just checked and disclaimer I&#x27;m not trying to diminish OP&#x27;s achievement which is huge but ... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exeter.edu&#x2F;admissions&#x2F;financial-aid&#x2F;tuition-costs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exeter.edu&#x2F;admissions&#x2F;financial-aid&#x2F;tuition-costs&#x2F;</a>

Not just any high school. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exeter.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exeter.edu&#x2F;</a>

This is an incredible achievement! I&#x27;ve been working in hardware design for 10 years. I&#x27;ve touched on most of what was covered here across various projects in my career, but never all at once. To have the discipline and motivation to carry a project like this through to completion is seriously impressive.

For those that missed it, this Engineer is in _high school_.Byran, I have been a professional engineer longer than you have been alive, I can tell you right now that I have met very, very few people that would have the motivation, skill and sticktoitivness to pull this off.

i&#x27;m playing around with your onshape document and learning a lot of things for my own projects. thanks! (also, amazing work of course)

Dear @LenovoPlease hire this guy to help you make the thinkpad&#x27;s keyboard to do wireless magic with the trackpoint and the mouse buttons include. Thanks

FYI, none of my engineer friends in the U.S. can pull this off. This is truly impressive.

OP you are incredibly talented. I believe very few people on earth could do something like that at your age and deliver. Congratulations !

Mad respect for this build. That&#x27;s well beyond what many professionals in this field are willing to attempt

Just opened Youtube and your video was on top of my home page! I will watch it later today.Congrats on the awesome project! Actually, I think &#x27;well done&#x27; is more fitting since this must have taken a ton of work and willpower!

You can just patch Windows to remove the check. It&#x27;s not like any critical components of Windows are encrypted.

So if you want to install windows on this, do you have to add some secure bios feature? Is it possible to have access to that without big license fees?

The project is outstanding but the fact that you&#x27;ve documented everything AND did a video about it speaks volumes about what you&#x27;ll achieve if you keep at it

Super cool work! One question: How much does JLC want for such a low volume cnc part of reasonable complexity like the laptop shell?

I might have missed it but how much did this cost in total?

Pretty awesome. As someone who deals with Rockchip stuff a lot, I am going to take a look at the software part for sure.

This is one of the coolest, most inspiring projects I&#x27;ve seen anywhere - wow! Seeing you and nrp connect here in the comments was so cool; just the start, I&#x27;m sure.---It was neat to read through the progress log (1), which begins,&gt; &quot;It was around 1AM. I wrote up the mission goal (2) and went to sleep at 2AM. The start&quot;,and ends:&gt; &quot;With the YouTube video and blog post almost done, I hope this isn’t the last of anyon_e. But rather, the start of a trailblazing journey.&quot;This project is the epitome of MUREX Electrical&#x27;s mission statement, &quot;attempt the impossible&quot;:<pre><code> It&#x27;s &quot;impossible&quot;, a non-MUREX Robotics Electrical member might say. However, we accept it as the process. In the end, we will have achieved something others might have called &quot;impossible&quot;. But the achievement only comes through endless, motivated attempts at the impossible. (3)

</code></pre>
1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.byran.ee&#x2F;progress" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.byran.ee&#x2F;progress</a>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.byran.ee&#x2F;posts&#x2F;mission" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.byran.ee&#x2F;posts&#x2F;mission</a>, which links to (3)3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;murexrobotics&#x2F;electrical?tab=readme-ov-file#attempt-the-impossible">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;murexrobotics&#x2F;electrical?tab=readme-ov-fi...</a>

This is really one of the best things I&#x27;ve seen on HN in 15 years.The mixed presentation of plug and play components interspersed with EE problems and solution really helped make it more accessible. It also got me excited about the possibilities and made me realize that we we might already approaching another open architecture DIY boom.I got the sense that this is a side project, but I&#x27;m sure many have noticed that it could be a legit framework-level company. Someone already mentioned the recruiters, but also you&#x27;re sure to have investors knocking. Whatever you do, please keep having fun and sharing it.

Looks like the cnc milling was done by a shop - jlccnc.comSo there&#x27;s probably a price there, but it&#x27;s probably well under $1kPrice list would be cool to have

it&#x27;s not as expensive as it looks, if you don&#x27;t count time. CNC alu and the display would be the biggest costs. other carrier board projects use 3d printing over CNC, but the display&#x2F;bandwidth is kinda what makes this novel so a lower res wouldn&#x27;t make sensereally hoping Byran&#x27;s excellent writeup helps encourage others. SoMs have lowered the barrier to entry and birthed a ton of SBC&#x2F;carrier communities, but most of their tribal knowledge is buried in discord servers

Impressive!Suggestion: It would be nice to include a price list on the article.This project is impressive as heck, but aside from being intellectually out-of-reach for most kids, it would be financially challenging as well. Last I looked, CNC aluminum blocks were well out of the reach of 99.9% of kids (but that was decades ago; perhaps prices went down).For people wanting to follow in those footsteps, it&#x27;d be nice to know which things cost $5, which $50, $500, or $5000. Just that kind of intuition is helpful.

Amazing work. How much did it end up costing?

Nicely done, huge amount of grit and craftsmanship.

some people just have what it takes and all you can do is watch and appreciate. really awesome!

Here are some numbers from Orange Pi 5 Plus: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xnux.eu&#x2F;log&#x2F;088.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xnux.eu&#x2F;log&#x2F;088.html</a><pre><code> 2.4W – idle
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s from early upstreaming, and for the whole board. But I can&#x27;t imagine it being much lower these days.

How is the idle power consumption of RK3588? I bet it&#x27;s pretty high, I&#x27;d expect more than 1W.I have a board with old MT6572, it idles at 270mW with working CPU, even less when in semi-sleep (turns off CPU and wakes up every half a second).

Pinebook Pro boots in about 10s to DE and that&#x27;s RK3399. Pretty sure RK3588 can boot even faster, considering the advantage of PCIe&#x2F;nvme storage that can run at &gt; 3GiB&#x2F;s. Software load times stop being a constraint at those speeds.My Orange Pi 5 Plus boots to sway+firefox already open in about 15s and a lot of it is waiting for net being online.<pre><code> 7.125s systemd-networkd-wait-online.service</code></pre>

By the way, you can tune boot times further. My print server board boots in 8 seconds to Debian 12 (bootloader + kernel + userspace).<pre><code> 1. Make sure the bootloader (u-boot) loads the kernel as fast as possible.
 - Disable automatic Ethernet&#x2F;USB&#x2F;other subsystems initialization (you can keep them enabled, just don&#x27;t activate unless requested in the shell manually by the user)
 - Tune `distro_bootcmd` command
 - Make sure that MicroSD&#x2F;eMMC&#x2F;SSD works full-speed (with proper clocks and speed protocol)
 2. Use fast decompression algorithm for the kernel and initramfs
 - It&#x27;s either zstd or gzip
 3. Collect boot file access data and sort the files on the filesystem
 - The benefit in near-linear access &amp; read-ahead
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m pretty sure that the current 20 seconds could be shrunk down to 14 or so.

Went all the way through the article to be surprised at you saying:&gt; I ran out of timeAnd then realized this was a ... high school project!?Way to go, amazing work!

Extremely cool project and congratulations on having the mental wherewithal to see it through, and in such short order!

That&#x27;s impressive.I&#x27;d be really happy with myself if I just built a case and put off-the-shelf components in it.

Unbelievably impressive. Such a wide breadth of skills and expertise needed to pull this off. And the final product looks great! Kudos to you!

because the guy spent more time shipping the product than iterating on the website that describes the product. (Deadly sin of every startup wannabe)

While this is impressive, how come you can&#x27;t make your website scroll without stutter?

Heck of a high school senior project, my hat&#x27;s off to you.

Thanks to the work of the community the RK3588 is also on the right track regarding mainline support, severly reducing the fear of turning into unmaintained kernel hell. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.collabora.com&#x2F;hardware-enablement&#x2F;rockchip-3588&#x2F;notes-for-rockchip-3588&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;mainline-status.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.collabora.com&#x2F;hardware-enablement&#x2F;rockchip-35...</a>

My vocabulary hasn&#x27;t got appropriate compliments - so I&#x27;d just say congratulations to the author, you&#x27;ve got serious talent, hard earned skills, and great mentors.Just commenting so I can&#x27;t come back later and claim I wasn&#x27;t stealing lots of ideas from the author for my own project; the hinge problem, keycaps, the mainboard designed on KiCAD, are all interesting.

&gt; &gt; Thank you to the Phillips Exeter Academy Science Department for supporting this project.This is what can happen when you live on a campus and don’t waste your life commuting.

Fantastic work. How did you learn all of the EE and low level programming needed to pull this off?

Hello! I&#x27;m Byran. I spent the past ~6 months engineering a laptop from scratch. It&#x27;s fully open-source on GH at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Hello9999901&#x2F;laptop">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Hello9999901&#x2F;laptop</a>

Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch