On another forum I asked about the practicability of modifying a 7 inch notebook cabinet to become pc card compatible. Lkcl rejected my suggestion. He argued, that keyboard, sound, batteri etc would require custom pcbs. Expenses worth thousand of eus. Doing it wrong and the computer could catch fire. I am not going to spend thousand of eus. I will try to modify a computer. I have no expectation, that I will be able to do it. I have come to think that the pc card is a raspberry pi. If your display is hdmi and other devices are usb, then you have a computer. On youtube I found a person who had turned notebook's touchpad into an usb touchpad. I asked him about modifying these notebook devices to usb: speakers -> use an usb soundcard mic -> use an usb soundcard camera -> notebooks camera may be an usb device. Else get an usb camera. touchpad -> many synaptic touchpads are usb compatible. I do not know what to do about the left and right buttons. keyboard -> that will be difficult.
battery -> likely difficult. At least if you want to be able to charge and have the computer turned on at the same time. display -> either get a lvds to hdmi converter or get a hdmi display. I do not now if a 7 inch hdmi display requires separate power.
It appears the keyboard is the biggest difficulty. On his website one person wrote about modifying a notebook keyboard to an usb keyboard. He wrote it is about getting a controller which will fit the keyboard's wiring. Then it is a matter of mapping the keys correctly. I do not know about powering the keyboard or rather the controller.
I bought a 7 inch display asus eee pc 4g. If you get to use the battery cabinet, there ought to be space for the devices. Tell me what you say?
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.
Look up a little thing called the "Teensy" -- it is a microcontroller board. You can (if you are *very* good at soldering) connect from the keyboard's PCB connector (cut the PCB and solder to the connector while it's still on there -- no shorts, mind you, or it won't work, and the pin pitch is usually insane...) to a Teensy and make a "custom keyboard" that way. You will of course have to program the Teensy but that's the easy part ;) an Arduino Leonardo clone from eBay (also try to find, if you still can, "Arduino Micro" clones -- NOT the "Pro Micro" ones, they won't have enough pins). Same code will run there and work just fine.
Forget the battery, unless you have a reflow toaster oven (or other homemade reflow equipment, or access to the professional gear) -- you will need it for the kinds of chips that let computers talk to batteries, AFAIK. Too much trouble.
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?
--- 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.
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.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 2:00 AM, Christopher Havel laserhawk64@gmail.com wrote:
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.
yep.... that's what i did. four hours later i had destroyed the connector because the graphite had come off. what partial information that did have was of no use.
destroying a keyboard and examining the flexible PCB was what did it: i found that the layout was ROW1 ROW2 COL1 ROW3 COL2 ROW4 ROW5 COL3
nothing that was even remotely sensible!
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..
so not a shabby amount of processing, then. not bad.
l.
I'd say a keyboard that's that awful inside isn't worth the effort to reverse-engineer... the Adesso one (also sold as a SolidTek) had separate connectors for rows and columns, as typically do the super cheap (and sometimes, but not always, awful) eBay ones such as I'm using in the AnyTop.
For the record, the AnyTop has the same specs as the cheapest laptop at my local Wal*Mart... which is a $219.xx HP job that honestly looks like it should say Tonka* on it somewhere. Cheap bright-blue and white plastic... it's horrendous, and it really does literally look like a kid's toy the way it's put together.
*For those not in the know... Tonka is/was a popular line of toy trucks for little kids, along the lines of Hot Wheels / Matchbox / etc. Not remote control or electronic at all -- just little push-around cheap plastic toys.
On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 2:20 AM, Christopher Havel laserhawk64@gmail.com wrote:
I'd say a keyboard that's that awful inside isn't worth the effort to reverse-engineer... the Adesso one (also sold as a SolidTek) had separate connectors for rows and columns,
that would have been a hell of a lot easier... but you don't necessarily get to choose that in advance. i picked the chicony semi-arbitrarily
For the record, the AnyTop has the same specs as the cheapest laptop at my local Wal*Mart... which is a $219.xx HP job that honestly looks like it should say Tonka* on it somewhere. Cheap bright-blue and white plastic... it's horrendous, and it really does literally look like a kid's toy the way it's put together.
:)
hi ron please can you read and follow standard netiquette by using line-breaks at around 70 characters per line, or using a mailer that does this automatically for you. the easiest way is to set "plain text mode" when composing or replying to arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk.
i am forced to edit the text below to add a line-break every 70 characters and to add the inline reply ">"s manually. it is a lot of work.
thanks.
On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 10:33 PM, ronwirring@safe-mail.net wrote:
On another forum I asked about the practicability of modifying a 7 inch notebook cabinet to become pc card compatible.
why would you make a 7 in notebook PC-CARD (PCMCIA) compatible? are you confusing PC-CARD with EOMA68?
Lkcl rejected my suggestion.
i would never have entered into a discussion about converting a netbook to PCMCIA (ake PC-CARD).
i _would_ however have highlighted the strong mis-match between spending time on taking *any* pre-existing mass-volume casework and attemtping to shoe-horn PCBs or other components into it when the goal is *eco-conscious* mass-volume computing.
the ted talk on "How I made a $3 for $1800" illustrates this futility beautifully:
https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch...
so if the goal is to convert an entire industry over to responsible eco-conscious computing, starting from the labour-intensive exercise of *disassembling* a pre-existing computer that was never designed *to* be disassembled is not a good way to go.
on the other hand, if you simply wish to have a learning experience (with a very sharp learning curve) then yes, go ahead.
He argued, that keyboard, sound, batteri etc would require custom pcbs.
correct.
Expenses worth thousand of eus.
correct.
Doing it wrong and the computer could catch fire.
it would.
you also forgot to mention the huge difficulty of sourcing the right connectors. many of the originals (which were likely custom-designed) will simply be .... end-of-life.
you also forgot to mention the reverse-engineering needed for any parts/components you intend to re-use.
touchpad -> many synaptic touchpads are usb compatible. I do not know what to do about the left and right buttons.
you will need to reverse-engineer the touchpad buttons. try disassembling the touchpad, looking for ICs then searching for their datasheets online.
also you will need a multimeter.
keyboard -> that will be difficult.
indeed. i spent several weeks on reverse-engineering one: in the end i had to get a duplicate, smash it open, and then trace the tracks from the connector, by hand. that alone took about two hours.
battery -> likely difficult.
yes. and dangerous to get wrong.
At least if you want to be able to charge and have the computer turned on at the same time.
no... just dangerous, period. get things wrong with a lithium battery and, well, you can google "lithium battery fire" just as easily as anyone.
display -> either get a lvds to hdmi converter or get a hdmi display.
if you are looking to replace the existing LCD you will need to know the exact dimensions of the existing LCD.
get them wrong and you will be looking at modifying the casework.
I do not now if a 7 inch hdmi display requires separate power.
all displays will require power. you will need to know - in advance - the current and voltage. then organise the PCB to provide that.
It appears the keyboard is the biggest difficulty.
no.... it's just one of the dozens of big difficulties. designing a laptop from scratch didn't take 18 months to create a first prototype, for no good reason.
On his website one person wrote about modifying a notebook keyboard to an usb keyboard. He wrote it is about getting a controller which will fit the keyboard's wiring.
yep. sounds like he knew what he was doing.
Then it is a matter of mapping the keys correctly.
... which you will have to reverse-engineer.
I do not know about powering the keyboard or rather the controller.
well, you look up the datasheet on the controller and it will tell you.
l.
arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk
-
Christopher Havel -
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton -
ronwirring＠Safe-mail.net