Lessons from the Novena laptop project | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from the Novena laptop project

lwn.net

79 pointstux19689 comments

I wished I had half a reason that I could use to justify buying one of these. As it is I barely use the laptop that I've got, as my eyes are getting steadily worse I love my big screen monitors and associated fonts. Of course I could hook one of those up to a laptop but that would not give me anything I don't have today.

Still, this is by far the coolest hardware project I've seen in a very long time.

Nice quote from the article: "A company called Myriad noticed that Novena used the same breakout header as its own software-defined radio (SDR) board, and offered to re-spin a version of the board specifically for use with the Novena."

Very very neat. The Novena is really what open source is all about and I may end up buying one simply to support the poject (though I suspect that once I have it I'll see my productivity on commercial projects drop substantially).

> "Interestingly enough, someone in the audience also asked about the price point. Cross replied that the comments break down into two distinct camps: FOSS people say "wow that's an expensive laptop" but FPGA users say "wow that's so cheap for a development kit!" "

Above from the comments on the LWN article. So if you got into FPGA development, this would become a cheap option!

I quite like the idea of the 'transportable desktop' (the one up from the bare board without the battery board/battery and keyboard &c). I hope they carry that on to the second generation.

That's mostly a matter of packaging, you could just get the laptop, make a nice case to suit your requirements and call it a day.

It still looks an expensive FPGA development kit to me. A Parallella board is a cheap FPGA development kit.

One think I can't tell is whether the FPGA on the Novena can bus-master back to the main CPU.

I'm sure somebody could spin a Mini PCI/PCI Express Mini Card with an FPGA easily enough that would let you do interesting stuff in a laptop.

I love this project. I probably would have jumped in if there was a more conventional laptop around the $3k mark. The $5k heirloom, more-traditional version was pretty cool, but tough to justify for myself.

It will look like this https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop

It is GREAT to the crowdfunding of this eclipse their goal! This project is a great example to show that hard work and know-how can produce something truly fantastic.

Any chance they could use RISC-V in the future?

Andrew "bunnie" Huang is working on the novena and is also on the Technical Advisory Board of lowRISC - a core based on the RISC-V instruction set. So I guess that there is quit a chance they will use RISC-V in the future.

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