Regarding the keyboard... here's the secret. Get hook probes for your multimeter. The little springloaded ones. (Google Image search if you don't know.) That reduces it to a non-invasive half-hour process (or thereabouts)... that's what it took me with an Adesso ACK-595 USB compact keyboard.
Hook to one row, one column, with your multimeter set to continuity. (This may or may not be a challenge to identify.) Press a key. If you get a match, move to the next column and the next key. Proceed systematically.
As for the AnyTop. Body is a standard three-ring binder with the ring module removed (that's what the drill is needed for -- #(^&$#@!! rivets). Display is a Chinese clone of the WaveShare 7" 1024x600 "Type C" HDMI touch display, ignoring the touch input. Keyboard and mouse are cheap compact wired USB models. There is a four-port bus-powered USB hub (system unit has only two ports... ew) that's an IOGEAR model I'm personally familiar with, it's a gem from them. (I'd prefer a self-powered hub, but those get too expensive too fast.) System unit is a WinTel CX-W8 or similar... Atom Z3735F CPU, 2gb RAM, 32gb eMMC SSD... you know, the usual for set-top style and "cloud stick" style cheap-piece-of-crap Chinese computers on eBay. Power supply is a 5v 6a brick. No battery. There is a piece of cut-out cardboard to prop the lid portion of the binder up.
Everything goes together with 3M double stick foam tape (or a compatible third-party substitute) except the power supply leads -- which go together with wire nuts. The knife is needed to cut/strip wires and to make a hole for the HDMI and power cables to go through to the system unit. The screwdriver is needed either (a) if the binder's ring thing for once does not use rivets, or (b) if the LCD is ordered with a case (which is an option, not a necessity).
Once the parts are all present and accounted for, it should go together in far less than an afternoon. Figure about a couple hours for a complete novice who is all thumbs. I'm debating including a MicroSD card with each set of instructions (this is not, and will not be, a kit) that contains a customized, installable Linux Mint image that will run on these computers... standard Mint generally does not have working WiFi, Bluetooth, or audio. Of course, maintaining my own semi-fork of Mint is not something I find a particularly scintillating prospect, so that may or may not actually happen, even though the other choice is sticking people with Win10, or letting them do the work of installing their own Linux and hunting up drivers and coaxing the system into working properly.
On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 8:34 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net
wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 10:40 PM, Christopher Havel laserhawk64@gmail.com wrote:
Keyboard is easy if you know a little electronics. A laptop keyboard is a matrix keypad. Rows and columns. One key connects one row to one column.
i found quite a lot of tutorials online about this. and still had to destroy a perfectly good keyboard in order to reverse-engineer the row/column matrix.
I am designing, for a competition on Hackaday, a "made from common
modules"
"laptop" that I'm calling the AnyTop. The goal is that anyone can build
it
if they can use a screwdriver, knife, and some sort of drill. (The drill
is
only needed in one place.) It won't have a battery... but it will be a laptop form factor and it will work. Luke, would some discussion of this
be
on-topic?
sounds great. i'd particularly be interested to hear how much time and effort it takes any one person to follow the resultant instructions, and how much they have to spend to do it.
l.
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