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Has the computer become a black box, even to experienced electrical engineers?
Will we be forever reliant upon large, opaque organizations to build them for us? Absolutely not, we say. And to prove our point, we built our very own laptop, from the circuit boards on up.
Admittedly, we did not delude ourselves that we could build a laptop that would be faster, smaller, or cheaper than those of Apple, Dell, or HP. However, we did set out to build a machine powerful and convenient enough to use every day. Fortunately, our dream inspired enough people to crowdfund the effort. Our laptop, which we call Novena, started shipping to backers in January 2015.
TFA has a lot more details on the project, the steps involved, the choices they made.
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There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:05PM
Doesn't the cortex A7 have support for trusted execution (trusted video path), a chunk of CPU where things happen... in secret?
For measurement or experimentation perhaps but subsonic transducers are a specialist thing with few real world applications.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday November 01 2015, @03:31PM
>we took the unusual measure of extending the analog frequency response of the headphone jack to below 20 Hz
That's silly. Even assuming you can hear it with your ears (and not feel the vibrations with your body), you'd need a pair of headphones that can reproduce that low a frequency with enough power.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @03:24AM
Headphones aren't the only thing that may be plugged into a headphone jack. The output could be directed to an amplifier and thence to a bass shaker. Feeling vibrations with one's body can be fun. When watching a sensie flick, the sensation won't truly replicate the tossing about that happens in a major earthquake, but that's not entirely bad.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Sunday November 01 2015, @08:14PM
It also has a closed source GPU with god knows what else going on inside of it. It's okay though cause they're not using closed source drivers, right?
Honestly doesn't seem much more open than a RPi, but I might be talking out my ass.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0, Troll) by fnj on Sunday November 01 2015, @10:59PM
No comment. How does it smell in there? Seriously, if you can't tell the difference between this and a Raspberry Pi, the kindest thing that can be said is that it's not for you. So what?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Sunday November 01 2015, @11:46PM
Please elucidate then. How is this more open than the pi is, hardware wise?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @06:33AM
Can't even boot a rasp in freedom.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers [fsf.org]