Every so often, some brand or another takes a stab at a modular or upgradeable
laptop. And as someone who does an awful lot of PC building and is very pright to
repair, I am so here for it every single time. I even invested my own money in
framework to show my support for the dream. But alas, a dream remains because
almost all of these efforts end up discontinued before they even become a
real product. Which raises the question, if all these big companies can't do it,
how come this guy can? Byron here
customd designed, built, and open-sourced his own ARMPowered laptop
in just 6 months. But it's a shockingly potent machine. I'm talking a 4K AMOLED
screen, CherryMX mechanical keyboard, and a custom machined aluminum chassis.
And the guy's still in high school. Then he casually throws together this highly
polished video showing how he did it. I mean, have you seen my first videos?
Obviously, I had to meet this guy. So, uh, hang on one second. Hey, Byron. Zoom
is just so impersonal. So, I flew Byron out here so I could check out
the Anonyi. Yes, Anonyi. Yes, in person. And my
first question for you is, do you dance? I do. Really? Do you know the uh here?
Do you know the segue? Our sponsor ODU helps you dance away the work headache.
Moonwalk through all those crazy taxes keeping your business moving to the
beat. They have over 50 apps covering everything from accounting to marketing
to HR and more. The ship storm sale
event is live now on ltstore.com. You'll
get free shipping on any order over $150 worldwide. So, it's a great time to
pick up a commuter backpack or a scribe driver, a screwdriver, or anything else
you've had your eye on. And we're featuring our lowest price ever on our
magnetic cable management essentials bundle. Go check it out at the link down
below. Didn't notice how bad the quality was.
It was funny you say that because as I was walking up to set earlier, I saw
your machine. I thought it was mine. I am impressed at how good it looks.
Actually, this is incredible. Oh no, you broke it already.
Wow, that was actually really quick even for me. Okay. What happened? It's all
right. I don't really know. Wait, did you just throw it away? Yeah, that was a
screw. It's okay. Screw, you know, bad quality. But the important thing is that
it's still all together, right? Do you want to put the screw back? No, it's all
right. Cuz I think I have the perfect tool for you. What is it?
What are you talking about? From ltstore.com. Yeah, let's go. My first
and maybe most important question is why? When I set out to b make this
laptop, I really wanted to focus on creating something.
That's going to be the memes forever now, right? That's going to that's going to be in the drop reels going on in the
future. You set me up. I did. You set me up. I did. Yeah. It looks like you
didn't watch the video I made. I skipped through a little bit. Yeah, I can tell.
Well, see, here's the thing. Whenever I know that we're going to be making a
video about something, I go out of my way to cloister myself. I don't want to
learn any more about it than I have to. The keyboard. Yep. I know it's Cherry
MX. That's right. Um I know that it was
custom made including the key caps. That's right. You know that there are
commercially available laptop keyboards, right? So what inspired you to take this
detachable approach? So when I set out to make it, I really wanted to focus on
creating something that the keyboard will be a centerpiece of the laptop. And
when I can't focus on the performance of the chip itself, I'm limited to, you
know, a crappy rock chip RK3588. I wanted to make the laptop stand out in
other aspects like the 4K AMOLED display and of course this wireless removable
keyboard. The entire battery is enclosed in here and it is a fully wireless
Bluetooth keyboard. So it just, you know, simply slots in to the laptop
chassis magnetically like so. And you can use it on another laptop, you can
use it on this laptop, whatever you want. Putting in Cherry MX mechanical switches was a challenge that I really
wanted to do cuz I I love mechanical keyboards. You never actually answered
the question of why. So, in the past, I really worked on a lot of open source
electrical engineering projects. And so, I've worked on various parts of what
might be considered a laptop system like power systems, um, keyboard, compute,
display driving, human input. I worked for Keyron in the past designing a new
product. After making all those things, I really wanted to put everything together into this one cohesive package
and make it open source for everyone to see. I'm going to try to use the keyboard first cuz we haven't even
powered this on yet. I want to have that experience a little bit later. I want to
connect the keyboard to my laptop. All right, great. So, I would assume there's a pairing button. So, no, there isn't.
There is not. There's also no off button on this keyboard. It's always on. Wow.
Yeah. Uh, good. Yeah, of course. Convenient. It is. It's always on. And
the reason it can do that is cuz it's on ZMK, so it runs almost a year on a
single charge. No way. Yeah, almost a year. I haven't charged it really since I I built it. 94%. It even has battery
life reporting. Yep. You got to be kidding me. Yeah, that is very cool.
Also, I cheated a little bit while you were distracted. I pressed down on one
of the keys. That is a shocking amount of travel.
That's right. Considering how thin this thing is. Yep. Yep. Like it's it's like
it goes all the way down to the PCB. Every single slice of this keyboard has
been designed to be as thin as possible. If someone brought this to me as a V1
prototype of a product, I'd be like, "Fuck, send it." Yeah. Cuz this is
awesome. I don't know if you know this, but I'm actually a 915 TKL user. And
what I love about it is that it's a desktop keyboard, but it's it's super
low profile, and I love the I love the feel of the key switches. I would say
there's a little work to do on the profile of this before it was a retail
product, but in terms of the feel, like what you've accomplished here is
outstanding. Yes, he knows it. Thank you so much. Thank
you. He knows it. Thank you. It has a
shockingly typewriteresque sound. Yeah,
I actually kind of love it. Here, hold on. You got to kind of here. You got to kind of hear it up
close. Like it almost it has a bit of a clang, which in the mechanical keyboard
space is not quote unquote desirable, but it does it in kind of a
cool way. I guess my next question is how confident were you going into this
that you would be able to build something resembling like I said I
mistook it for my own machine right a
real laptop. I'm calling mine a fake. No. Uh I'm calling it not commercial. Ah
yeah. Yeah. I set myself really really high bars. Like I looked at a Framework
13 and I looked at a 14-inch MacBook Pro. I tried to make as many comparisons
as I could to them and accomplish as,
you know, as close as I possibly could. The confidence pretty much zero. Why
don't we talk about the thing that really sets this machine apart from
other DIY laptops, and that is the machined body. There's less flex than
yours. Hold on. Let's validate this.
Okay. Okay. That's a lot of flex.
Pretty good. I think that is I've never done that to it. I'm just too scared.
Yeah. Well, it didn't break. So, that's a
Yeah. Yeah. Let's go. So, in choosing
the chassis design and the material and the annotization, I made a bunch of
these cubes. This is half of the cubes I evaluated. And so, in the end, I settled
on this one. The reason I know it's this one is cuz I actually like milled into
it. So, I knew how malleable the metal was if I had to modify it later on. Oh,
got it. So you were looking both at the finish and at the actual material
because we say, "Oh, it's made of aluminum, but almost nothing is made of
pure aluminum. It's made out of some aluminum alloy and they have very
different properties potentially. The unibody design is quite special than a
traditional laptop. The palm rest or the mid plate as I call it actually screws
in from the top and the the reason stems from the actual keyboard being a
removable detachable piece. So, I wanted it to just slide right in. And the most
optimal position to do way to do that would be by having the bottom completely
screwless. There's nothing behind it. And you just machine out basically this
bottom shell and then the top shell. And then you put framework hinges this
closure, right? Yeah. Yep. All right. So, you put these hinges in and you
just, you know, it'll come together just like that. Obviously, it's a it's a
function first design, but I want to have a quick philosophical conversation
with you. Personally, I don't like
seeing the function of a product harmed by this. I feel irrational desire to
hide screws. Y do you think it's okay to
just have some screws visible on something? Of course. I mean, why not?
If you get to where you need to go, screws are the way. I also have duct
tape there, you know. Okay. There's only two types of screws. Uh there's only
Torx and Phillips on there. Nice and repairable. And now we're pulling up the
CAD. So, this is the bottom chassis itself. And no wonder it's so rigid.
Yeah, it is fully CNCed and and heavy.
What? It's a little heavy. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Hefty. Yeah, hefty. Yeah, I missed
the F. He t There's a lot of different
parts that come fitting that comes to fit into the actual chassis, including
the two framework 13 hinges. Yeah. And then so the powertrain board mounts
right over here. Yeah. And then the actual main compute board, I call it the
main board or the motherboard goes right here. Do you call it that? Did you come
up with that term? No. Main board. I didn't, but I call it that. Um, and so,
and then here we have four individual battery cells. And I wanted to make
these battery cells separate. One is for safety. I didn't want to blow up like
the entire laptop when I was sleeping, but it also allows me to build a custom
battery pack so I can specify to however much I want. This can actually discharge
150 watts at any given moment, but obviously it won't ever do that. But,
you know, just for a rock chip, not on a rock chip. Here on the left side, we
have um two USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 ports. I
don't have the firmware to support a external display on them just yet, but
you know, maybe in the future. In the many revisions I made with the laptop, I actually have three separate designs for
the main board. I switched from an HDMI, which didn't really work, and the signal
integrity was a little off. I switched to a USB 2.0 port at the very end. And
also just cuz I was mad that you know how how how can a MacBook not fit a USB
2.0, you know, a USBA port in there. And this is no thinner. This is This is no
thicker. Since we're at it, why don't we look at the rest of the IO? You've got a micro SD reader. Nice to see. Headphone
jack. Doesn't work. Oh, yeah. Bad engineering. Oh, yeah. It just didn't
work. I don't know why. And then this is a power only input, right? So, you
cannot charge the battery from this side, I would assume. Fortunately, no.
The reason you can't charge from these USBC ports is because I wanted to
separate the compute and the power system so they individually function first to save the timeline. This looks
great, by the way. This is very classy. Yeah, I really like that. So, did you
just take it to a third party shop to have it machined out? I did. I got it CNC by JLC. It didn't cost that much. It
only costed around what $300 to $500
really for the entire chassis, every metal piece combined. And that included
the cost of the metal? Yes, it does. And the anodization. So, it came to me fully
blacked out already. Oh, dude. I would have guessed over a,000 for sure. You
want to take a guess at how much this laptop costed? R&D everything added up
together. How are you calculating the R&D? What are you billing out at? Every
everything that I bought, everything that I bought to make this laptop. So, just parts. Just parts. Every failed
revision, every, you know, misinput, everything that I had to buy cuz I
burned it. All of that added up. So, really, I should be looking more at you
than at that because it's like, how much would he burn? How much would he
destroy? a lot. I'm going to say what?
5K. You're spot on. It's around 4.8. 5K.
Yeah. Yeah. I still got Oh my god. Yeah.
Well, look, we've developed a number of products ourselves. So, I have some idea
of what the failure rates are like when you're trying to figure stuff out. This
is it. Big moment. I get to turn it on now. I have expected it to make like a
MacBook noise or something. I I don't know if you're an Apple fan. Turns on a
bit. There it goes. Oh, dude. You got like a you got like a splash screen and
everything. That's cool. Thank you. I still remember when I set up my old
machine when I was about your age to have a uh to have a Jolly Rodger for the
Windows XP loading screen and it said
Windows XP Pirate Edition. I might not be alive for that.
Okay, let's get through this video and
then I retire. Is reception an issue? Where did you put
your antennas? Yeah. So the antennas are actually underneath the space between
the battery and the palm rest. So there's metal in front of them. Yes. Ah
but you know metal and air are just you
know the difference of molecules right basically. I mean yeah. Are you sure you
wouldn't have considered maybe you know running them up here like they do on
other laptops? Yeah but I got lazy from
my past having done 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz
and RF engineering. It doesn't really matter if you're going through um metal
that much. All right, let's see this display. Okay, man. This display looks
incredible. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about that. Where on earth do you go
about getting a 4K AMOLED panel if you need one? I was just looking through
scrolling and I found this panel, the ATNA 33TP11 from Samsung. That's the 4K
AMOLED display panel you see here. It was on some old ASUS laptops from 3 4
years ago. And I really liked it cuz it looks so good and yeah, looks awesome.
So, I bought some off of Tao or the Chinese AliExpress basically. And the
hard part was running it directly from the RK3588 over embedded DisplayPort,
right? Cuz here's the thing. Embedded DisplayPort theoretically is a
standard, but everyone both on the system side and the panel side around
with it. So, how did you get it working?
Yeah. One sec. He's gone. He
left. I mean, I broke his laptop. I guess I kind of had it coming. When I
first started the project, I chose this RK3588 system on a module. Yeah. So, it
slots into this development board just like that. You know, just pop it pops
right in. Beautiful. This is that thing that we featured, the little NAS thing.
It is. You were the one that inspired it. Oh. Oh, that's cool. Great. Nice
little board. And, you know, you can make a laptop. Yeah, it's a really cool little board. We're probably going to
have a Floatplane behind the scenes for this with some extras. So, uh check it
out. lg.gg/flowplane. It's for the w What the
Yeah. Sir, now when you talked about different
pinouts, different protocols, OLED panels actually have a different pin out
than LCDs. And since no one DIYs OLED panels, I had to reverse engineer them
from a data dump on Linux from the Asus laptop that used to have them. So after
doing some reverse engineering and maybe procuring a data sheet, this is the
cable that is needed to drive the display. Very, very fine pitch 40 pin
cable and it's impedance matched to the EDP specifications. And that's at least
one thing that you know they go by somewhat. How do you source one of
these? How do you know it's the right one? Yeah. So on Tao they actually sell
um OLED EDP cables. And so I just bought
one and pray that it works. Unfortunately it didn't really work
because these cables actually convert from a standard LCD pin out to an OLED
pin out which is not what I actually want. Oh cuz you want to go native. Yes.
I want to go OLED to OLED. OLED. Yes. So then what did you have to do? So, what I
did was I made two of these boards. They look wildly different from one another
because one of them works and one of them doesn't. Can you guess which one works and which one doesn't, Lionus? I'm
going to say this one works. How did you know? Because it's just simpler. He's
right. He's right. So, actually, it
came. Again, we've designed a couple products. RF engineering is kind of
black magic. So, a lot of the signals you can't really probe. You just have to guess based on vibes. So, my guess was
that this was just too much loss. And you know it looks really really cursed
plug in its HDMI but actually the chips
the chip the RK3588 itself convert uh
has a multiplexer inside the chip that takes either HDMI or embedded display
port and sends it out. Right. So what I actually did was I changed the Linux
kernel driver or the device tree to output EDP off of this HDMI port
instead. And um then you went straight into here. Boom. Yeah. And after a lot
of kernel development and some device a lot of device redefinition development,
it just works. Plug it in and it just works as a native display. Let's talk
about the trackpad. This thing feels great. Yeah. Is this glass? It is glass.
Glass topped. Man, everyone should just use a trackpad
with a glass top like this. Sorry. What gesture did you want me to? If you do
three finger like that, I got a Mac with Hey, look at that.
Oh, I love it. Fun fact, by the way, Linux had that like a decade before
anyone else did. I have a spare trackpad right here. It's a module from Aotech. A
Zotch. A Zotch. So, they're an OEM trackpad manufacturer. I decided to just
buy a module and modify it to fit within this laptop. They don't actually don't
make it anymore. I think they were losing money selling them. So, it's too bad that they don't continue to sell
them because for DIYers that dev kits
can be an absolute lifesaver. I want to hear the speakers. Your speakers? Oh,
they will shock you. What flavor of Linux are we on right now? Almost
identical. Yeah. Also going to You know
the crazy thing is if you press it down back lit and not full lit
whereas I'm just lit. Why am I flat? I'm drinking. I
I said I was going to blow you away, right? Yeah. You didn't say if it was
going to be in a good way or a bad way. Well, I certainly can't call you a liar
then. Now, I have a question for you. You obviously are using an ARMbased chip
for cost and power efficiency reasons
and also because there's no way Intel's going to send you, you know, the
drawings that you would need to develop an Intelbased laptop or whatever. Did
you really feel like that was that much of a compromise these days? I think with
the RK 3588, it really wasn't that big of a compromise because you can do
pretty much everything that you'd expect on a mid low-end laptop. Of course, you
can't play, you know, Balders's Gate or something, but sure, you know, you can
do, you know, regular everyday tasks on it, no problem. Theoretically, there is
a project that's working on having Windows run on RK3588 based chips. But
the development it requires to support custom hardware like mine where I made a
motherboard and I made the power system and driving the display. It require a
lot of work on to develop the firmware itself to boot the laptop and get it to
a working state. That's super cool. I want to see Minecraft.
So, you said 4K 60. I guess you meant 4K
60 Hz, not 4K 60 frames per second. Well, you see, if you look down at the
ground, you get 60 FPS. I see. Yeah. But, you know, it's
playable. It's playable. Especially on Bedwars Hypixel where you're actually
rendering a lot less than a world. You actually hit quite high frame rates. It
looks great, right? It does. It does look great. There's no webcam. No. What
was your reason though? Well, publicly, it's for
privacy, but honestly, it's just so difficult to implement something so
thin. I didn't have the time and the capability to fit in a full webcam and
run it through the dis hard display. And it's easy to complain about webcams.
It's really hard to make a better one. I am playing video games right now on this
laptop which looks like a real laptop
and obviously has some rough edges. Yep. It's falling apart a little. What would
you say is your biggest specialty that helped you execute this? It's the making
these circuit boards myself. Yeah. And
you can see here he's got his own silk screening. This board here is clearly a
lot smaller than the development board here. Got your own socketed M.2, your
own socketed Wi-Fi module slot. The fact that this works is a small miracle. Are
you doubting my skill, Lionus? Nope. I'm saying that the fact that your skill
exists is a small miracle. Thank you. Thank you. I'm calling you a miracle. Take a compliment. Thank you, Lionus. I
appreciate it. Wow. And that's it. Sorry. I have this one
too. And then we just put the uh the rock chip, daughter board, brain board,
whatever you want to call it, on on there. Boom. Just like that.
This is outstanding. Like the density
here. I would be impressed if I saw this
on a professional product, let alone, no offense, but from like some kid. How
many layers is this? Six layers. So I
have the top and bottom layer for signal and power. The second two layers for
impedance matching as a ground reference plane and the middle two layers as power
rails. So every trace on the high-speed signaling like the USBC, USBA, SD card,
they are all impedance match in particular the u uh embedded display
port signaling. Everything in this region is impedance controlled and
impedance calculated, simulated, all of that to make sure that the signals don't
get interfered with on its way to whatever we need to do. And that stuff
is a that stuff is a and a half. Like,
wow. Now, the last question that I'm
sure people are going to be asking is this project obviously raised your
profile a fair bit. Have you gotten any interesting job offers? Yeah, I can't
disclose much, but I did get uh more job offers than the number on my hands,
which is great. I'm super grateful for that. Yeah. And I got to make a a video
with you. Well, I mean, that's the best thing I got. Sure.
Yeah. Yeah. The guys who work here can see how excited they are about it. Wow.
Really? But I bet whoever gave them to him doesn't dance around topless like a
firefighter. It's a little traumatizing.
I can send you the design files for the circuit boards because a lot of people
wonder how you make circuit boards like this. pretty much anyone can get a
circuit board made. This cost $60. $60? Yeah. Like it is shockingly affordable.
With this out of the way, what's your next big project? Yeah. So, I have two projects I'm trying I'm trying to get to
right now. One is a super super light mouse that doesn't have a battery, and
I'm going to leave it at that. It's going to be super light. There's no battery, but it's wireless. Okay. No
spoilers. You'll have to subscribe to his channel. What's the other one? I hopefully in the future I'll get to
making a second revision of the laptop. or I'm gonna have a better chip, better
everything, and maybe maybe get to making some kits. Yeah, that would
actually be really cool. I mean, you've open sourced all of this, right? That's right. Yeah. Uh everything you see on
this table is completely open source on my GitHub. That's super cool. So, we're
going to have that linked in the video description. I love this keyboard. The
the keyboard, dude. I This is really cool. This is a really cool showcase
piece. But you really like the keyboard, but this is this is this is a product.
This is that that's that's very cool.
Thank you. Yeah. And you know what else is cool? Firing Colton shouldn't be a
joke. What we actually take to fire Colton. Okay, Dennis, we talk about this
every month. ODO is sponsoring this video. Take this. All right, sit down.
Let's talk. Let's check his attendance. We got to find something. Oh, man. He's
actually been really reliable. Wait, what? And he's been doing all this OT.
He might actually be working really hard. Dennis, showing up to work doesn't
mean he's actually working. Yeah, that's true. Let's check his goals, then.
Excuse me. He actually accomplished all of his goals. Dennis, you need to pay me
more. Okay. What if he's been expenses his personal stuff as work? That can be
a big problem. Oh, wow. He's expensed like $3,000 in March. What? Pizza party
with friends for $900. That sounds very
suspicious. Yeah, I didn't get invited to this party. Con, you're so fire. Con,
you're fire. Happy birthday. Never mind. If you guys enjoyed this video, then you
will enjoy Byron's deeper look, which as
I admitted before, I have only skimmed. But now I get to watch fully. Um, and
I'm really excited for that because he goes into a little bit more depth on
some of the individual design choices as well as like the specs which we kind of
glossed over here. So guys, you're going to want to check out his video. You're going to want to check out his GitHub.
Is there anything else you want to shout out since you're here? Thank you to everyone for supporting me. Hi mom.
Thank you for having me. Oh yeah, my pleasure, dude. Uh
oh my god.
Really nice to meet you, man. They see me less.