Hardware hacker Bunnie Huang is crowdfunding the Novena Open Laptop. In a blog post he said:
We're launching a crowdfunding campaign around our Novena open hardware computing platform. Originally, this started as a hobby project to build a computer just for me and xobs [Sean Cross, the other builder on the project] - something that we would use every day, easy to extend and to mod, our very own Swiss Army knife. I've posted here a couple of times about our experience building it, and it got a lot of interest. So by popular demand, we've prepared a crowdfunding offering and you can finally be a backer.
Does this open design seem expensive for an ARM quad-core?
Bunnie Studios is launching a crowdfunding campaign around their Novena open laptop:
Novena is a 1.2GHz, Freescale quad-core ARM architecture computer closely coupled with a Xilinx FPGA. It's designed for users who want to modify and extend their hardware: all the documentation for the PCBs are open and free to download, and it comes with a variety of features that facilitate rapid prototyping.
The machine comes with Debian pre-installed, and the hardware comes in 4 variants:
- "Just the board" ($500)
- "Desktop": comes with case and LCD screen (no keyb/mouse) ($1195)
- "Laptop": same as Desktop + battery and a 240 GiB SSD (no keyb/mouse) ($1995)
- "Heirloom laptop": same as Laptop but with a handmade wooden case. ($5000)
In January, Make magazine ran an article on this project.
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As previously brought up on Crowdfunding for Novena Open-Hardware Laptop [april 5, 2014].
boing boing marks the end of the crowdfunding Last day of the Novena open source hardware laptop crowdfunding campaign. The final result is very impressive - it more than passed every target and then doubled it just to make sure!
When last we brought it up it looked like a few of you were underwhelmed by the hardware that Novena was offering.
Can someone please explain why you think that this is outside of an expected pricerange for a laptop you can update and improve?
(Score: 2) by elf on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:07AM
I'm a bit underwhelmed with this. I like open source, open hardware but the price points seem a little off for a big box with some circuit boards in. The top category of $5000 for a wooden laptop seems silly, who would ever want one of those? They aren't portable.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Bartman12345 on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:31AM
Sometimes when there is someone collecting donations on the street for a charity, they give each donor a little badge, or maybe even just a sticker, to wear in return. Do people donate to these charities to get themselves a little badge? No, their real reward is knowing they contributed to a worthy cause.
I think that the same sort of thinking is behind this campaign. No-one would buy a $5000 wooden laptop because they thought it was worth the money, the laptop is just like those badges, a token of appreciation for supporting open computer hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 06 2014, @12:05PM
It looks like it is using a Thinkpad keyboard. If this motherboard will fit snug into an older Thinkpad chassis (maybe a T60 with 15" IPS display), there is certainly a viable market. Lenovo sure isn't doing any favors for Thinkpad loyalists.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Sunday April 06 2014, @01:23PM
Frankly the whole thing sounds fishy when you consider that you can go to any number of Chinese manufacturers and get a laptop based on that board for a HELL of a lot cheaper. After all there are plenty of quad ARM tablets in the $100-$120 range right now so I have serious doubts that merely slapping a keyboard on it would raise the price to $2000.
So IMHO if you want something to tinker with that isn't gonna break the bank pick up a tablet from some place like Price Angels [priceangels.com] and get to tinkering. after all Android is (at least ATM) open and those Chinese companies I have NO doubt would be happy to send you source if asked, their business is selling hardware not software after all, and at those prices if you break it so what? These prices are just too damned high IMHO, which makes it smell funny to me. If they were using some exotic chips that would be one thing, but its ARM quads, not exactly a rare or expensive chip.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:22AM
This seems like an interesting piece of hardware for hackers (in the traditional sense of the word), hobbyists, and some specialty users. But I don't see a lot of practical uses for it with those low specs at those high prices.
The only real laptop form factor this has is the $5000 wooden box version (weighing how much?). I guess you could consider a keyboardless & mouseless $1995 device that doesn't have a touchscreen a "laptop", though I don't. And opening "the wrong way" is great for access to the internal hardware, but it is not conducive to use on your lap.
Only a 1.2Ghz ARM? A 2nd Ethernet port makes it more flexible, but it's only 100Mbit? A 2nd 1Gbit would have been too expensive? At these prices?
This isn't really a consumer product, and the target market is limited by the physical design. I can see that it has appeal to the device development crowd, tinkerers, hobbyists and the like, but there may be cheaper alternatives that already meet their needs.
(Score: 1) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday May 21 2014, @01:14PM
"Only a 1.2Ghz ARM? A 2nd Ethernet port makes it more flexible, but it's only 100Mbit? A 2nd 1Gbit would have been too expensive? At these prices?"
Lets look at the interfaces available from the iMX6 that could support gigabit: 1 PCIe port. Yup that's it, 1 PCIe port. And they chose to connect it to a mini PCIe slot to give the user the freedom to use it as they please. Now, they could have slipped a cheap quad port PCIe switch in there. But for some reason, switch makers are very proprietary and specs would not be available for open sourcing. So that is a non-starter. 100 mbit can be done via SPI and I am guessing the second port is an SPI Ethernet chip.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:44AM
"Just the board" ($500)"
Are they just reselling a Digilent Zedboard? I'd LOL. I've occasionally looked at that board and imagined, given COTS monitor that can run on 12V, and a USB small keyboard, and some kind of power, it would make a pretty cool FPGA laptop.
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Nav Path=2,400,1028&Prod=ZEDBOARD [digilentinc.com]
One stereotype about FPGA dev boards is unlike the microcontroller people they tend to pack an enormous amount of non-upgradable and non-removable stuff on the board. So if the .edu market isn't asking for DDR3 slots, because the kids will static zap their memory, lose/steal their memory, then the board makers won't sell them. So thats why the stereotypical FPGA dev board is impressive if it has more than 128 megs of ram like the zedboard has. This might be the new companies "secret sauce" here's a whole series of dev boards with 8 gigs onboard and 8 USB ports not just one.
The other problem with these integrated ideas is Imaginary Property IP. So webpack or the equivalent is free as in beer but product locked to smaller simpler FPGAs, you know, for .edu purposes, so if you think you're going to use the biggest FPGA xylinx sells with the weirdest integrated peripherals and a huge design, suddenly you go from being able to use free as in beer webpack to having to pay $50K/yr or whatever a top end license sells for now a days for the dev tools. Which sucks. Historically its been even worse, like you can get a license unlock key if and only if you have a request on university letterhead from a prof... which I'm not going to have. I have not done the research required to figure out if I can program an advanced zedboard for free or not, much less the new devs product. And it doesn't matter if they got a sweet licensing deal last year I/we have not heard about, because I/we have not heard about the sweet licensing deal, all we know is gaining the ability to legally program it is going to be a pain.
From the dev perspective it would be cooler to have about 6 relatively small FPGAs I know I can program rather than one monster. That's another market segment the stereotypical FPGA dev board makers have not entered, obviously they'd rather sell 6 boards and you hook them together than one board with 6 smaller FPGAs on it. Which is too bad.
(Score: 1) by bequalsa on Sunday April 06 2014, @06:55PM
Indeed, I already have a Zedboard, so while the Novena is interesting and definitely a good idea, my itch is already scratched, so to speak. What's nice about the Zynq is the tight coupling from ARM to FPGA, since it's all in one chip (actually I don't know if this is strictly true, it could be an MCM or something... anyway it's all in one package at least), so you have serious bandwidth.
On the other hand Novena has laptop/computer infrastructure that is really not available anywhere else in open source. The LVDS and SATA should be very interesting to look at. A lot of that stuff is in the SoC, though, and the connection to the FPGA (which is on the small side) is not terribly fast. If I had a lot of time/money, I would take a higher-end Zynq and use the GTPs to implement some SATA/PCIe interfaces.
About licensing, the Zedboard kit comes with a voucher for a device-locked Vivado license. However I'm not using Vivado (yet), just ISE, and I'm pretty sure the '010 and '020 devices are unlocked in the free WebPack tools. The Spartan-6 on the Novena is also supported in WebPack (there are no Xilinx tools for ARM though, so you still need another computer to run them on). Fancy IP costs extra, of course.
Re: having multiple FPGAs, my experience has been that it's a major pain in the ass.
(Score: 1) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday May 21 2014, @01:22PM
The only downside to the Zynq is it has no graphics, not even a frame buffer. You have to use FPGA logic for video which takes up valuable logic space. And forget about 3D, though there are proprietary PGU HDL cores available. Though, if you had a Zynq with GTP's, you could create a PCIe port and use an external GPU. Other than that, they are great for embedded use where you need graphics but need plenty of CPU.
(Score: 1) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday May 21 2014, @01:00PM
"Are they just reselling a Digilent Zedboard? I'd LOL. I've occasionally looked at that board and imagined, given COTS monitor that can run on 12V, and a USB small keyboard, and some kind of power, it would make a pretty cool FPGA laptop."
Read the description. The CPU is a Quad core 1.2GHZ iMX6 from Freescale. It is coupled to an external FPGA via (from what I can tell) the CPU's external memory or parallel bus (not PCI). How would this be a Zedboard?
"One stereotype about FPGA dev boards is unlike the microcontroller people they tend to pack an enormous amount of non-upgradable and non-removable stuff on the board."
What about all of the enormous amount of non-upgradeable I/O inside of the micro controllers? I have an Mbed that has: Ethernet, USB, PWM, SPI, CAN, UARTS, I2C, Analog in, Analog out (not PWM, an actual DAC) Memory, timers, interrupt controllers etc. etc. And if they didn't offer I/O then what? Either the uni's would have to fabricate their own I/O or a 3rd party would. Who the hell wants to do that? And as for soldered on memory, it has to do with ease of use and standardization.
"So if the .edu market isn't asking for DDR3 slots, because the kids will static zap their memory, lose/steal their memory, then the board makers won't sell them."
They don't make education boards with upgradeable RAM because students don't need it. It has nothing to do with zapping/loosing/stealing. A student studying HDL and FPGA's does not need the latest Xilinx or Altera chip with 1,000,000+ LUT's, 12+GHz transceivers and gigabytes of DDR3. They simply need a small board with some LED's, switches, I/O ports and some memory. Hell, many basic designs can forgo the external RAM and use block RAM instead. Not every DIMM has the same signalling, timing or capacity. Does a uni wan to play games with selecting DIMM's and having to deal with different sizes which will require different programming? Of course not. The last thing a prof. wants is some student complaining that their design doesn't work only to find out they got the board with that wonky el-cheapo DIMM on it after three hours of wasted lab time. The soldered on RAM works the same on EVERY board, guaranteed. The board maker need only supply one memory controller reference design and be done with it.
"The other problem with these integrated ideas is Imaginary Property IP."
ARM is a IP company. They don't make chips. Is ARM imaginary property as well? They paid developers to design, test and verify those IP cores which are ready for production and inclusion into ASICS if necessary. They also provide support for those cores. Those cores can make engineers lives much easier and reduce development costs. So they charge money for them. Commercial software isn't free. News at 11.
"So webpack or the equivalent is free as in beer but product locked to smaller simpler FPGAs, you know, for .edu purposes, so if you think you're going to use the biggest FPGA xylinx sells with the weirdest integrated peripherals and a huge design, suddenly you go from being able to use free as in beer webpack to having to pay $50K/yr or whatever a top end license sells for now a days for the dev tools. Which sucks. Historically its been even worse, like you can get a license unlock key if and only if you have a request on university letterhead from a prof... which I'm not going to have. I have not done the research required to figure out if I can program an advanced zedboard for free or not, much less the new devs product. And it doesn't matter if they got a sweet licensing deal last year I/we have not heard about, because I/we have not heard about the sweet licensing deal, all we know is gaining the ability to legally program it is going to be a pain."
This. I will give you this. Unlike CPU's, FPGA internals are 100% proprietary and the only compilers are from the vendor. Its like if you wanted a compiler for your Pentium and Intel and only Intel would provide the compiler for a license fee. That or a free license but you don't get to use SSE and are limited to real mode. There is no GCC/Clang like OSS compiler for any FPGA. Though, the larger FPGA's are not something a small OSS project or student would use. So its no big deal they aren't supported in the web pack. Plus have you seen the prices of those larger FPGA's? They can run into the hundreds of dollars and I am sure I have seen >$1000, for just the chip!
"From the dev perspective it would be cooler to have about 6 relatively small FPGAs I know I can program rather than one monster. That's another market segment the stereotypical FPGA dev board makers have not entered, obviously they'd rather sell 6 boards and you hook them together than one board with 6 smaller FPGAs on it. Which is too bad."
It sounds more like you want to do bit-coin mining. That is a limited use scenario. There are a few vendors with multi FPGA boards that let you mix and match modules etc. But they are not cheap because of demand.
(Score: 1) by chloride on Tuesday April 08 2014, @02:25AM
I know of Bunnie Huang from the Chumby - I bought one for my son as an alarm clock (the Chumby, not the Bunnie). One day early in 2013, Chumby simply sublimated [wikipedia.org], leaving behind an extremely uninspiring basic alarm clock. All the widgets were flash-based, and unfortunately served from a now-dead central server (lesson, that). Prior to the great die-off, the underlying OS managed to lose some features through updates, including the ability to pick a random song from a USB stick as a wakeup tune (highly effective at getting a 3-year old out of bed). I plugged it in a couple months ago, and couldn't even get to the boot screen.
Both my son and I really liked it, but by just abandoning the platform (and thereby effectively killing any devices in the wild) I'm not sure I'd trust getting more hardware from Dr. Huang. I recognize that open platforms are great for tinkering, but if I wanted to go that route I'd get a Pi or Beaglebone. I really didn't feel like devoting hacking time to trying to resurrect the poor thing.