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I’m curious about building a laptop but am getting hung up on motherboards (beehaw.org)

submitted 9 months ago by megopie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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I’m aware of things like framework and they’re a cool system, but they’re limited in what chipsets can be used by the mother boards they offer.

I’m thinking in the context of a cheap low spec system that can be handed out for use by a group. Most of the options available are just very pricy.

Maybe something like a SBC would be a better fit since there are plenty of cheap options out there and they can be mounted in a custom built shell with the other needed elements.

A thought that crossed my mind was ordering printed circuit board and just soldering on the sockets and the like, but that’s a very involved process with a lot that could go wrong. Especially for someone with very little experience.

Short of custom ordering from a company that does such things, are there any systems for building a mother board?

This is more out of curiosity about what options there are out there. Any other thoughts people have about custom built laptops or interesting things in that space?

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[–] AArun@programming.dev 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Something I always found interesting was a cyberdeck which is kind of like a mishmash of components. Nowadays you can use sbcs for the hardware but I've always been given the families ewaste and doing some research you can reuse a lot of it. I have an old celeron laptop that's too slow for anything useful. It's just the bare board now ziptied to the lid of a shoebox and I use it for low power learning server. But found out the display connector it uses for the screen, which is gone, is very common and found a 9 inch screen that would work with it. With a 3d printer you can build cases for everything.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yah, that’s where I kind of started from in thinking about this, but then I started looking in to getting off the shelf components and ran in to the reality that short of cramming a desktop motherboard in to a laptop shaped box, there was just no way to make it work. The cooling alone was a no go, so it was a matter of using SBCs or ripping something out of an existing laptop, which kind of defeats the point unless something else is broken in it.

[–] anlumo@feddit.de 2 points 9 months ago

You can buy just the motherboard of a Framework laptop and build something around that. There are even cases for them available to print.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago

Interesting idea. The netbooks that ASUS introduced and Google Chromebooks are good examples if minimal hardware. ASUS had to stop promoting and apologize to Microsoft for competing with them but Google of cousre did not because it could go it on its own and has deep legal pockets.

Other thing is to think in terms of minimum usable product. A barrier there is that it needs to be enough hardware to drive a web browser and a screen that is or is near HD. This tends to mean a lot of memory and computing power.