Crowdfunding the Novena Open Laptop

Having worked with bunnie and xobs at chumby, one thing I can vouch for is that they intimately understand the risks and challenges of actual real-world hardware production at scale.<p>The fact that they went ahead with the crowdfunding on this is a really good indication that it will actually ship (if the goals are hit), and with a much higher probability of being on time than your average Kickstarter hardware project (where the people behind it usually have never had hands-on experience with actual production runs).

At 2:15 in the video, the screen behind his head flashes a loop of the string &quot;Y3Jvd2RzdXBwbHkuY29tL25vdmVuYS1wdXp6bGU=&quot;. When run through a Base64 decoder, it outputs &quot;crowdsupply.com&#x2F;novena-puzzle&quot;. It would appear as though we&#x27;ve got an ARG on our hands.

I&#x27;m always interested in open hardware but I&#x27;m a bit baffled by the choices that are available:<p>Just the board: This is perhaps the most appealing option but I would want a case with it, I&#x27;m not interested in building my own case. Why would I want a 4GB microSD with that? I&#x27;ll buy my own with a decent capacity&#x2F;class or even an SSD.<p>All-in-One Desktop: $700 more than board for a case and LCD? The design of the flip-top LCD doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense - you lose a lot of desk space and the board is going to collect dust. It&#x27;s not very portable due to the lack of a battery, controller board, keyboard and mouse so I might as well just plug it into my monitor.<p>Laptop: $800 more than the desktop option for a battery, controller board and SSD. Seems a little expensive and again still not very portable. I&#x27;m not sure you can call it a laptop without a keyboard or pointing device.<p>Heirloom Laptop: $3000 more than the &quot;Laptop&quot; for what is now actually a laptop that includes a keyboard and pointing stick with a wooden case. Wood is quite heavy so it&#x27;s not exactly the ideal material for a portable device.

Thank you, bunnie, Xobs, et al., for listening to the interest that was expressed for what was a personal project and deciding in response to expand its scope (quite significantly), providing this momentum to open-source hardware and systems.<p>(I don&#x27;t know bunnie nor Xobs, but this is what I gather happened based upon reading occasionally about the project over the past some months.)<p>From my perspective, bunnie provided a write-up of what he was up to, purely for the interest of those who cared to read. There was overwhelming response.<p>If you care about open systems and hackability (in the classic sense), this is <i>really</i> worth looking into and hopefully supporting. (From my admittedly limited perspective.)

Like the Open Pandora (I still use every second day) or Openmoko (paperweight), I&#x27;ll happily put my money forward supporting open hardware.<p>Congratulations Bunnie&#x2F;xob&#x2F;others on the release of the crowdfund.<p>This is stage one. Community, hackability and continuous development cycles will lead to better, more feature packed and stable devices. The CPU was a good choice for performance&#x2F;power&#x2F;openness but there is nothing stopping them from using a modular design for the SOC and people could replace them as required.. the www.pyra-handheld.com&#x2F; is build on that idea.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to the use cases for the laptop...<p>Side question: Is there much in the way of design that can be done to improve the physical security to this design? or are we hoping that people simply don&#x27;t have the driveby ability to mess with this due to the fringe-ness? and physical access is physical access.

For those that didn&#x27;t instantly recognize the name, this is Bunnie Huang&#x27;s open laptop he talked about previously [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bunniestudios.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?tag=novena</a>

I have been waiting for some time for the crowdfunding campaign.<p>The FreeScale i.MX6 platform is very versatile. Up to quad core 1.2GHz, SATA, PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet (limited to 480Mbps) and lots of good documentation and driver support.<p>The only issue is the graphics blob and... in this case the price tag. I hoped I could afford it, but it looks like I can&#x27;t.<p>Still, there are lots of other community boards based on the i.MX6 SoC. If you don&#x27;t need the laptop version or an FPGA, there are much cheaper boards out there.<p>The Novena Open Laptop really is good work. I hope it&#x27;ll get funded!

Open laptop because we&#x27;re worried about state-sponsored attackers expending multiple millions of dollars of time and resources to undertake the lowest level of attacks upon our hardware.<p>Top model ships with a keyboard with a radio transceiver built in.

I&#x27;m happy to see some sane crowdfunding pricing on these reward tiers. So many projects have their reward pricing set similar to retail prices. That&#x27;s fine if you&#x27;ve already done all the R&amp;D work on the project and there&#x27;s little risk, but if you actually need net funding from the project then you need a significant overhead on every reward.<p>That said, I hope this is successful, these guys are consummate hardware hackers, it&#x27;ll be neat to see what happens when they ship a project on this scale that ends up in a lot of people&#x27;s hands.

The boards are a little out of my price range at the moment. But definitely wanted to support this project, so I have backed &quot;Buy us a Beer&quot; at $5.

Love at first sight. The only thing left is deciding whether to buy the desktop or the laptop version.

This is GREAT to see Novena make it to this step. A truly awesome amount of work by bunnie and xobs it exciting see them make this far!

this guy is pretty awesome, might be just the hack candy one might like to have if one is into hardware hacking.<p>TL;DR: here is the video from a conference where bunnie and his friend hacked flash card controller, so you can see the qualities that the laptop will possess.<p><a href="http://youtu.be/r3GDPwIuRKI" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;r3GDPwIuRKI</a>

Why use (and advertise) &quot;High Modulus Epoxy&quot; as the bonding agent for the wood version? High Modulus means stiff, and unbending - i.e., crack instead of bend, and in bonding wood to aluminum, a lower modulus resin would be better for this case, as it would flex when stressed and not cause a snap-off delamination?

What are the use cases for the FPGA realistically? Then only piece of easily downloaded and installed code is a SHA based crytocoin miner.

A little off-topic, but they gave a nice talk about SD Card exploitation at the 30C3 in germany: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo</a>

Great idea really I wish them success!! but why are they using the keyboard from a Thinkpad.They are the most infuriating keyboards ever as the fn key is on the bottom left side with Ctrl one key in one. Even Lenovo&#x27;s come with a switch in the BIOS to undo this. Before anyone says this is the actual format of the qwerty keyboard the overwhelming majority of people are used to it with Ctrl on the bottom left so just leave it

Very curious about the capabilities of that FPGA in combination with the rest of the hardware, and the high-speed expansion port.

Oh yeah. I&#x27;ve had my eye on this for ages. It comes with an FPGA!

Somebody please make a device which is more accessible (pricewise), and can be used to prototype&#x2F;interface with common digital protocols (i2c, uart&#x27;s, spi, CAN, ethernet, USB).<p>I&#x27;d imagine it could be a mashup of SBC (Beagle, Olimex&#x27;s LIME, heck, even RaspberryPi) and Bus Pirate. Add a screen and battery, and call it a day.<p>I don&#x27;t think a device like this should have the fastest CPU and plenty of RAM (that wouldn&#x27;t hurt of course).

i&#x27;d really like to get the main board _and_ the battery board, but no display (wrong size) and no case (wrong size). i&#x27;d like to use a modded thinkpad x-series case (and keyboard) and install a better display and board!

Some interesting choices, some incredibly disappointing.<p>A9 core rather than the virtualization-ready A15? (I&#x27;d rather have a 64-bit ARM but those are still a ways out)<p>Edit: and let&#x27;s not hear about how closed A15 is blah blah. At the end of the day, something is closed. Did Freescale give you silicon masks? Guess it&#x27;s not totally open after all.<p>Single SO-DIMM means max 8GB of RAM, but of course since you&#x27;re running a 32-bit chip you&#x27;ll be restricted past 4GB anyway.<p>100 Mbit Ethernet in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Fourteen? Edit: Several people have pointed out that, thankfully, the 100Mbit port is a secondary port, while the main one is Gbit. This is actually pretty cool.<p>The case is actually kind of cool, but you can&#x27;t really call it a laptop if your footprint is normal laptop size + a separate keyboard. Nobody&#x27;s lap is that big. I think it could be pretty usable for work while on travel but you can&#x27;t use it on an airplane tray table.<p>And then the pricing. Oh my the pricing. $700 for a case and a screen. Another $700 for an RC car battery and an SSD. Not even Apple marks up SSDs and batteries that much.<p>I would really love to get the laptop spec one for $800-1000--you know, the price of a great desktop PC plus a monitor. Sure, the ARM processor is going to be disappointingly sluggish and I&#x27;ll be beating my head against the 4GB memory ceiling within an hour, but it looks really damn cool and the screen size is acceptable.<p>Kickstarter-type things are often done as &quot;backers pay more for a unit, but they get it first and they&#x27;re willing to pay because they believe in the product&quot;. However, the prices will go UP by 10% after this campaign is over! So the $2000 &quot;laptop&quot; will now cost $2200, despite the reduction in component cost due to time and scaling.<p>Edit: oh, and apparently the case, which I think is one of the cooler parts of this project, doesn&#x27;t seem to be open? So I can&#x27;t pay a fabricator $200 to make one, then slap a $400 A15 board in there. The totally open laptop, ladies and gentlemen!

&quot;Novena is a 1.2GHz, Freescale quad-core ARM architecture computer&quot;<p>That&#x27;s a disappointing choice! Why not something more like LEON or OpenRISC?

How about finishing some projects before starting new ones?<p>I&#x27;m thinking of e.g. NeTV<p><a href="http://www.adafruit.com/products/609" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adafruit.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;609</a> <a href="http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kosagi.com&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Main_Page</a>

It is totally understandable -- and totally disappointing -- that this custom work of art in hardware comes with regular, bloated, unhackable linux. One can dream..