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posted by on Saturday February 04 2017, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can-change-more-than-the-battery dept.

Olimex just announced the avaliability of their TERES I DIY laptop. The name is from king of ancient times that ruled in the area of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Return of the netbook? At least once the products stop being out of stock.

This kit lets you assemble a laptop with quad core Allwinner A64 (64 bit ARM Cortex A53 cores), 1GB RAM, 11.6" inch screen 1366 x 768, 4GB eMMC, WiFi & BT, camera, 7000 mAh battery in just under a Kg. Avaliable in black or white, with US keyboard showing a nice Tux. In the assembly instructions you can see two USB ports, HDMI, 3.5 headphone jack, microSD slot, mic and side speakers. Multiple modular cards to update or fix as needed. No fans. Current price 225 EUR incl VAT.

AC opinion: the RAM is soldered and small for modern times, but it could become a plataform upon which to improve without having to throw away everything. Olimex already lists some ideas for future add ons, like FPGA based Logic Analyzer, in the instructions. All spare parts are listed already in shop, some with PCB files (Open Source Hardware, developed with KiCAD) for those wanting to do custom versions.


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  • (Score: 2) by lx on Sunday February 05 2017, @06:22AM

    by lx (1915) on Sunday February 05 2017, @06:22AM (#463044)

    Your biggest assumption is that this would be someones main computer. As a secondary device or one dedicated to a single task this looks quite attractive.

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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday February 05 2017, @07:51AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Sunday February 05 2017, @07:51AM (#463051)

    Even what I described would be nobody's primary computer. Anyone who isn't a geek these days will be using a phone or tablet and we geeks have need of more on a primary PC. ARM machines are slow, An Atom usually wipes the floor with one and we are talking about an Allwinner here, not a Tegra or top of the line Samsung SoC. What I would like is 'good enough' for a laptop.

    And 1GB simply isn't enough, no modern browser runs well in that environment now and the direction of the bloat only goes one direction. Same for the puny 4G of internal flash. I have a VM with a Devuan Ascii cut down to the bone, just to see how low I could go, Only the MATE Desktop and enough basics to say it is a desktop and not a ChromeOS like terminal / endpoint. 1206 packages, 3.3GB. You would need to set aside at least 1GB for swap because of the puny ram situation so you are already over budget. No way. Mounting /home on a MicroSD card is bad enough, do you want to put /usr on a slow device?