Building an Open Source Laptop

but can you trust what's in it after it's gone through airport security?

Is Frankfurt an American town? Surely it must be, since the Airport security employee was quite polite, enlightened and seemingly open-minded! Awww... time for those delusion pills again ... ;-)

gEDA (gschem and friends) has a fairly steep learning curve, but once you spend a few days getting in the zone it's a very solid schematic capture and PCB layout tool. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to try KiCad for anything serious, so I can't really make a comparison. I'm told it's now the better option vs. gEDA.

http://www.geda-project.org/

They're all a pain the ass. Even commercial stuff such as Proteus and Multisim. Then there's Mentor's offering which is barf.

(I did a spot writing some workflow software for an engineering team a few years back).

The good news are that CERN has adopted KiCAD for it's open hardware platform and are actively developing it, adding some cool features which may make it more on par with commercial tools: http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/WorkPackages

He's one of my hacking idols, along with Fabrice Bellard!

Off-topic, but something I learned...

I thought surely you meant the "Duracell Bunny", however the Energizer Bunny does indeed exist, and apparently although it's the later of the two, Energizer successfully registered the battery-powered bunny trademark in the US and Canada[1].

Here in the UK I'd say the Duracell bunny is the first to most peoples' minds.

Yes, yes, it's Friday!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duracell_Bunny

It works. Arduino, Makerbot, DIYDrones and a couple of others had 1M+ yearly revenues in 2010, they probably have all grown since then. Open source hardware is probably easier to commercialize than software, because it still has to be manufactured by someone.

> Why can't this work for hardware as well?

I'd be concerned about drafting up blueprints and having them copied by Chinese manufacturers.

Though what I'd do is make my first system just standard libre rights on everything, and that should build a platform for me to kickstart / donation fund future design efforts, and when those are done just release those as free as the last without a care if someone dupes the hardware because we already funded the design.

What you say is true. Bunnie acknowledges that he can't guarantee a 100% secure platform,

"Our Novena Project is of course still vulnerable to techniques such as silicon poisoning, but at least it pushes openness and disclosure down a layer, which is tangible progress in the right direction. While these heady principles are great for motivating the journey, actual execution needs a set of focused requirements."

https://thinkpenguin.com is the address (u before i)

Excellent. What are the keyboards like? Bendy chiclets or something decent?

Building IP-free core/wireless/... seems to be orthogonal to their goal. I think they would prefer to use such components, but I don't think they are in the right position to build them. It's enough of a problem that cores with NDA-free docs are not common (Bunnie wrote about it in the article).

I tried doing this as well, about a year and a half ago. I gave up relative early in the process, though, as I had hit the upper limit of my electronic design skills, and figured I'd better wait a wee bit more until they would either be on-par with the difficulty of the task, or a good-enough SBC shows up. Based on that experience, I'd venture thinking the price is in the 1000 USD range, with the costs of actually producing the boards (alleviated by more or less preferential access to the required tools) being a significant drag.

That being said, I think it's worth it. I can't think of a single laptop which I'd actually love to use forever, or at least until it's so old that it becomes utterly unusable. The only thing that prevents me from declaring this one as the one I'd like is that OpenBSD is a bit shaky on that architecture IIRC.

The cost of making one it probably several thousand dollars, not counting the year and a half of Bunnie's time.

From then on it depends on how many you want, and if you can find an assembly house that will take a tiny order for (say) 1000 of them. Even in large runs I can't see it costing less than $1000, partly due to the FPGA on the board. Handcrafted aluminium and leather cases are also likely make up several hundred dollars of the price. That case looks particularly resistant to mass-production.

If I recall correctly, bunnie's laptop was in the $2.5k range? I could be wrong, but I remember it being very high compared to mass-produced things, which makes perfect sense.

The Raspberry Pi requires a binary blob to function whatsoever, so it doesn't really make sense to use for the purpose of an open source laptop.

It's not a chiclet keyboard. Looks like the keyboard for the thinkpad X220. in my experience it's a very good keyboard. of course I would pay a lot of money for a mechanically-keyed laptop.

The "open source" part is what is different.

This is a laptop for hardware development and security research, hence the features [0]:

* FPGA on the mainboard

* Lots of digital and analog IO headers connected to CPU and FPGA

* Dual Ethernet

* USB OTG

Also, it's not just about licensing, but about having more control over the hardware.

[0] http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page

They do have design plans they are built from, so why not call it source?

One of the stated goals was being able to build the firmware from source. As firmware can be considered an integral part of the physical objects that constitute the hardware, I'd say that qualifies it as being an open source laptop.

> Physical objects don't have a source, either open or close.

Wrong.

The schematics for the motherboard and any other boards (like the LCD connector board) can be open or closed. Also, the CAD files for printing the case components on a 3D printer.

Hardware absolutely can be open-sourced.

Wrong. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware for (much) more information, this is really quite the thing right now.

You might disagree with the definition, if you somehow consider all the information that goes into the manufacturing of a physical object to be something else than the "source" for taht object, but this is how the term is being used by a lot of people, who are actually doing this.

While accepting the other replies, I do wonder how hardware trust is achieved. The security point about open source is peer review. For a dunce like me, I can pretty much rely on people much smarter than me to review open sourced code. In reasonable time, if there is a iffy routine buried in some bit of software, such people will out it. So, people like me can pretty much trust it, and even if something is missed but later found, again, we can be sure the discoverer will report it, while a commercial organisation might be motivated to hide it.

But, how does that work with hardware? How do we trust all the chips? How do we know there isn't something iffy built in at manufacture? Then, how can those same cleverer than me people discover it? How do they inspect the encased silicone circuit?

So, in that vein, I see the point you might have been making, and actually, I think its a worthwhile question. Because to me, it does look like what you describe, a sort of closed source hardware which runs all open source software. And I personally dont know that that is safe. Or is it?

I am a physical object. I consist of a complex series of 3 dimensional structures, energy flows and chemistry. My source code is a very long one dimensional array of four repeated symbols.

I think it was Ed Wilson who pointed out the 1d DNA leading to 3d structures (perhaps Schroedinger in his book What is Life or Gould in one of the many essays). I can track the reference down if needed.

Meta: I think you are wrong, but I'm surprised at the degree of down-voting.