Novena open laptop almost at $700k with 45 mins to go | Hacker News Reader

Novena open laptop almost at $700k with 45 mins to go

crowdsupply.com

40 pointsmfincham11 comments

Why would anyone buy that computer? It's too expensive for enthusiasts and too weak for doing real work on it. Not to mention its look and bulkiness.

By pure chance I just spoke to the guys who made it at Maker Faire. Very cool project.

They told me they have the full system running with zero binary-only blobs. I think that alone can be quite a selling point nowadays...

It's... "closely coupled with a Xilinx FPGA. It's designed for users who care about Free Software and open source, and/or want to modify and extend their hardware: all the documentation for the PCBs is open and free to download, the entire OS is buildable from source, and it comes with a variety of features that facilitate rapid prototyping."

More than enough reasons for me. I'd buy one in a heartbeat, if I weren't broke right now.

I found a page where someone made a case on why it might make sense to fund the project and buy novena system. Here it is: http://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop

Exactly what I thought as well.

The Novena laptop is a neat niche product, but I don't see it taking off, even in a future version. For almost any task one wishes to accomplish, it's better to build specialized hardware that interfaces with a standard laptop than to build a custom laptop. I think a peripheral would have sold better.

It would be interesting to see if you can use the Myriad option to swap it for a Ath9K, and use it as a WiFi card instead. I presume that the LM6002D is going to be wired to the shared FPGA. It'd be neat to have a 100% open firmware wireless card too.

$701,845 raised with 280% funded..

Congratulations Bunnie and Xobs ;)

Their fundraising site, Crowd Supply, seems like quite the underdog. Should I root for them?

Would somebody mind decoding the messages that flashed on the monitor behind him at the end?

Y3Jvd2RzdXBwbHkuY29tL25vdmVuYS1wdXp6bGU= is base64 decoded crowdsupply.com/novena-puzzle

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