Home made laptop

The age of laptops dominated when lions were routinely commuting & needed the same confuser at home & work. The need peaked when commuting to the city. Commuting started declining in 2018 & may finally be over for the kinds of things lions have done for the last 20 years. There may still be a need for a laptop, but nothing as regularly used or as powerful as before.

Years ago, a pretty competitive laptop was only $400. Nowadays, nothing below $1000 is anywhere close to what a developer would need. Tablets are nowhere close to even the cheapest laptop. What's over $1000 is still manely what lions already had 6 years ago. Keeping an old laptop from 6 years ago working may be more practical than buying any new one. It got the lion kingdom wondering if a home made laptop can finally do better.

Reviewing the

https://frame.work/

modular laptop, it's not much different than the others, very small screen, very bulky, no stated battery life. There was also the raspberry pi laptop, the OLPC laptop, the netbook laptop. The problems come from trying to use general purpose components. Laptops just can't be every high performing unless every piece is purpose built just for 1 laptop.

Lions believe the ideal laptop is a bare screen & keyboard with no confuser. The confuser would be a separate brick which would fit in a backpack or a pocket. Maybe the confuser could be a phone. The different parts would need their own batteries. Everything would be connected over wireless.

The display

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0885RN8FQ

Suspect the most compact display would be a used laptop LCD with an HDMI converter, but there have recently appeared portable 15.5" 1920x1080 monitors for under $150. This one burns 5V/2A from a USB connector & weighs 1.8lbs

Wireless HDMI

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1374507-REG/iogear_gwhdkit11_wireless_video_kit_150.html/

is another $150. It's gone from something that was being marketed towards consumers 15 years ago to a boutique item for content creators, thus much higher prices.

The keyboard

There are el cheapo bluetooth keyboards, el cheapo bluetooth touch pads, or combos for tablets. It might be more ergonomical to connect a wired keyboard & track pad to a microcontroller. ($50) Keyboard/touch pad combos are 8.8oz.

https://www.amazon.com/Fintie-Ultrathin-Bluetooth-Multi-Touch-Microsoft/dp/B00XBTUK5M/

The keyboard & monitor would need some kind of structural support. If they're joined together, they could share a battery. The structure might be 3D printed or it might be wood. It could also be some kind of wearable.

The confuser

This continues to be the most expensive part if a development machine is desired. The mac mini has recently attracted some competitors. They're all made by Beelink with a boxy form factor sized to accomodate a 2.5" hard drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-i5-8259U-Beelink-512GB/dp/B08T657SM1

While they're expandable to SSD & RAM modules which are bigger than a 6 year old macbook, there's no way to get a bare confuser without pitiful SSD & RAM modules included in the price ($470). If a 2TB SSD ($200) & 32GB RAM ($200) get added on, it's $870. It needs 19V 3A. It might be hackable to 12V. It weighs 2lbs.

Of course, there's always minimally viable portable confusing based on a raspberry pi with 8GB RAM & 64GB SD card ($100). A raspberry pi + battery is still big enough to require the confuser to be a separate module from the monitor & keyboard. This is why raspberry pi laptops are always bulky.

The confuser could itself be modularized into a removable storage unit & confusing unit. The storage unit would plug into a raspberry pi when on a train & into stationary PC's in the 2 locations. This would reduce...

Vision Pro powerpoint concept
lion mclionhead • 06/06/2023 at 06:20 • 0 comments

The trend continues to be towards the future demise of remote work, so lions continue to keep track of head mounted display options for commuting.
Nreal changed names to Xreal. VR goggles were slowly getting replaced by ever smaller glasses.
So it was quite a stunner when Tim Cook said we're not going to continue towards smaller glasses. We're backing up with yet another big honking ski goggle.

The lion kingdom's opinion of the Apple vision pro is a very conservative revival of a product from 2014 which you would expect from a big company where everyone lives in their own microcosm of 2014.
The mane limitation might be the requirement of a large display to get 4k in each eye.
It's not clear why every top tier company is showing powerpoints of employees working remotely while at the same time insisting remote work is a myth & collaboration requires being in person. The VR craze is like the rise of internet appliances 25 years ago. They couldn't think of anything else so they all defaulted to internet appliances.
Anyways, the $3500 tag isn't going to happen. You could buy a really nice macbook pro instead or just retire instead of commuting.
The rise of head mounted displays
lion mclionhead • 01/16/2023 at 20:10 • 0 comments

A wave of 1080p head mounted displays came out of nowhere in the last year. The breakthrough was Sony finally achieving a 1080p OLED panel in a very small form factor. Before then, they were all 640x480, the display was too bulky to mount in front, so they were limited to filling a corner of 1 eye with a reflector. The new head mounted displays are much more compact than the giant VR goggles of decades past.

https://www.amazon.com/TCL-NXTWEAR-Glasses-Portable-Wearable/dp/B0BCXF1MJL

https://www.amazon.com/Nreal-Micro-OLED-Augmented-iOS-Consoles-Compatible/dp/B0BF5LKP5Q

https://www.amazon.com/Rokid-Glasses-Friendly-Pocket-Sized-Massive/dp/B09P4VJ895

The NReal Airs seem to be the most compact, with a $200 addon required for diopter adjustment. They all have removable shades of some form for totally blacking out the background.

For what lions use a laptop for, a head mounted display negates any need for the giant hunk of glass we've been carrying around for 30 years. The big question is if enough animals are going to adapt to head mounted displays for them to be mass produced or if the traditional custom of what a laptop should be is going to send head mounted displays the way of drive-in theaters.

The things reviewers complain about are contrast, lack of orientation sensing, & compatibility but these are all fixable in software. You can program black & white user interfaces & translate the HDMI standard into the displayport standard. Some of them find a stationary screen with a moving background to be disorienting or they want a bigger desktop by moving their head. The biggest challenge would be drawing a fixed screen orientation in a moving vehicle. That would require an IMU on the glasses & an IMU on the vehicle, both IMUs tracking magnetic north. That would determine your head's orientation relative to the vehicle.
The 1 place where a head mounted display wouldn't work is when using it outside, not wanting your eyes to be shaded.
Minimal enclosure
lion mclionhead • 06/09/2022 at 22:33 • 0 comments

The project got shelved again because the lion kingdom discovered yet 1 more laptop in a corner of the room. It's mane use would be an emergency job interview or a radio test. Otherwise, it's worth zip, but not until after some more notes.

Reusing a 10 year old keyboard would require a 26 pin 1mm pitch FPS connector. A wireless user interface is highly desirable to reduce the cabling. There is a very klunky keyboard/trackpad for just making it work:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FSKZVRG

It's 1 pound. Maybe it could be hacked into a more desirable trackpad arrangement. The raspberry pi & battery could go next to this style keyboard, but the compute module is still going to be a giant brick. A brick battery is far cheaper than anything flat.

The enclosure wouldn't bother covering any electronicals except where protection is needed. Plugging stuff in would entail accessing ports inside the enclosure.

The Dell Griffith Mark 1 shower curtain rings

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5403824

proved an interlocking slider mechanism could work for holding up a folding display.

The battery would use standard RC charging practices. It would be taken out to be charged & stored in the freezer most of the time. A diode would switch between manes & battery. There would have to be a coulomb counter

https://www.amazon.com/ANKG-Precision-Measurement-Connectors-connected/dp/B07YF393ZH/

& a buck converter to power the keyboard. An adapter for micro HDMI is already in the apartment. All this stuff would just be thrown in a big old case next to the keyboard. It would be as simple & bodged as possible.
Macbook dead again
lion mclionhead • 07/24/2021 at 21:33 • 0 comments

After spending 2 years doing nothing but sitting on the floor as a file server, running ADB, minicom, & fastboot, sucking 15W, the lion kingdom's macbook battery puffed again. It was originally a way to connect the home network to LTE, but this was eventually replaced by wifi on the piano signal processor. It was never completely discharged. It only got discharged a few hours for testing radios. So interest in a home brew laptop returned.

The lion kingdom has all the bits required for a minimal laptop. There's now a recycled 1366x768 panel, HDMI converter for the panel, odroid from many years ago, raspberry pi model 4B, 16GB SD card, touchpad, keyboard, random batteries, random buttons. The touchpad & keyboard just need a microcontroller to translate the HID protocol. The HDMI converter needs 8V.

The odroid was so expensive it burned a hole in the lion kingdom's pocket for many years, but it's a loss because of its 2GB of RAM while the pi has 4GB. In some far fetched idea, it could be a headless server of some kind running along side the raspberry pi. Raspberry pi 4B's now all run 64 bit linux.

The macbook's mane value was its 1TB SSD & it's going to be a loss. Salvaging it would require converting the macbook interface to USB.

This particular conversion would cost more than a non scam 2TB drive.

https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/External-SSD-Enclosure-for-Select-Mid-2013-to-Mid-2015-Macs/IF107-154

Most of the 2TB drives being sold today are scams.

It's nearly impossible to get 1TB in an SD card. Any replacement would be USB while the SD card would store the executables. The raspberry pi can also boot off of USB.

This leaves an enclosure. The simplest solution is packing the raspberry pi in the keyboard instead of having a separate box. The screen hinge is the biggest challenge.

The lion kingdom could migrate to a headless raspberry pi right away.
Wireless HDMI notes
lion mclionhead • 05/28/2021 at 02:01 • 0 comments

Potato Guy had some news about wireless HDMI. The mane problem is they have latency. The latency of a camera viewfinder alone was 65ms. An $1800 LCD monitor + camera got his latency to 135ms. The monitor + camera + $650 wireless HDMI was 180ms. So the high end wireless HDMI was 50ms. A low end HDMI would be higher, so it wouldn't be very fun to type on. A cheap monitor probably has the same latency as the $1800 monitor, because it's all in the camera's HDMI driver.

The best lions can gleam about the cheap HDMI bridges is they've gone up 50% in price like everything else in the last 6 months & their latency depends on range. At short range, they don't have enough latency for the reviewers to complain. The cheap ones have to be within a few feet or line of sight, which is good enough for lion applications.