Welcome to the bright side. I've been enjoying my Chromebook with coreboot and nerf'ed Intel ME for years. It's not as hard as many of us would think.<p>By the way, Chromebooks are cheap and is a fantastic platform to experiment with coreboot/de-intel-ME. Acer C720s are $100 right now.<p>There are 2 spererate tasks: Flashing coreboot and De-blob'ing Intel ME. If you just want to try coreboot with the Chromebook, then you can do it with software and don't need an external programmer. All you have to do is just remove the BIOS write-protect screws - MrChromebox's website is a great resource. If you need to de-blob the chromebooks, then you'd need an external programmer, such as a Raspberry Pi.<p>As a shameless plug, I have released a tool so one doesn't have to be an electrical engineer and/or a Linux expert to flash many Chromebooks/Thinkpads with a Raspberry Pi [1]. You don't really have to have a breadboard to flash the Chromebooks like you do with the Thinkpad in the article. Also, the cool thing about it is that it prepares the image on your x86 computer so you literally don't have to configure the pi and get/compile stuff afterwards. I didn't know that the X200 needs a patch. I will integrate the x200 support into ezpi4ME so people don't have to manually patch and wait for it to compile on the Pi.<p>1: github.com/htruong/EzPi4ME<p>Edit: I noticed OP has a blog post complaining about Acer 720s having problems. It hasn't happened to me, at least with MrChromebox's firmware. I did have problem with John Lewis' firmware builds, though.