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Every so often, some brand or another takes a stab at a modular or upgradeable laptop.

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And as someone who does an awful lot of PC building and is very pro-right to repair,

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I am so here for it every single time. I even invested my own money and framework to show my support for the dream.

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But alas, a dream it remains because almost all of these efforts end up discontinued

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before they even become a real product, which raises the question.

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If all these big companies can't do it, how come this guy can?

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Byron here, custom designed, built, and open sourced his own ARM-powered laptop in just six months.

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And it's a shockingly potent machine. I'm talking a 4K AMOLED screen, Cherry MX mechanical keyboard,

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and a custom machined aluminum chassis. And the guy's still in high school.

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Then he casually throws together this highly polished video showing how he did.

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I mean, have you seen my first videos? Obviously, I had to meet this guy, so hang on one second.

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Hey Byron, Zoom is just so impersonal. So I flew Byron out here so I could check out the...

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Anyonee? Yes, Anyonee. Yes, in person.

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And my first question for you is, do you dance? I do.

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Really? Do you know the... Here, do you know the segue?

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Didn't notice how bad the quality was. It's funny you say that because as I was walking up to set earlier,

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I saw your machine. I thought it was mine.

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I am impressed at how good it looks actually.

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This is incredible. Oh no.

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You broke it already? Wow, that was actually really quick even for me.

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Okay, what happened? It's all right. I don't really know. Wait, did you just throw it away? Yeah.

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That was a screw. It's okay. Screw, you know, bad quality.

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But the important thing is that it's still all together, right? Do you want to put the screw back in?

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No, it's all right. Because I think I have the perfect tool for you. What is it?

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What are you talking about? A screwdriver from LTTStore.com? Yeah, let's go.

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My first and maybe most important question is why?

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When I set out to make this laptop, I really wanted to focus on creating something.

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That's going to be the memes forever now, right? That's going to be in the drop reels going on in the future.

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You set me up. I did. You set me up? I did, yeah.

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It looks like you didn't watch the video I made. I still could. I skipped through a little bit.

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Yeah, I can tell. Well, see, here's the thing. Whenever I know that we're going to be making a video about something,

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I go out of my way to Cloister myself. I don't want to learn any more about it than I have to.

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The keyboard, I know it's Cherry MX. That's right.

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I know that it was custom made, including the keycaps.

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That's right. You know that there are commercially available laptop keyboards, right?

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So what inspired you to take this detachable approach?

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So when I set out to make it, I really wanted to focus on creating something that

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the keyboard will be a centerpiece of the laptop. And yeah, when I can't focus on the performance of the chip itself,

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I'm limited to, you know, a crappy Rockship RK3588.

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I wanted to make the laptop stand out in other aspects, like the 4K AMOLED display,

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and of course, this wireless removable keyboard. The entire battery is enclosed in here,

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and it is a fully wireless Bluetooth keyboard. So it just, you know, simply slots in to the laptop chassis magnetically, like so.

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And you can use it on another laptop. You can use it on this laptop, whatever you want.

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Putting in Cherry MX mechanical switches was a challenge that I really wanted to do,

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because I love mechanical keyboards. You never actually answered the question of why.

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So in the past, I really worked on a lot of open source electrical engineering projects.

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And so I've worked on various parts of what might be considered a laptop system,

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like power systems, keyboard, compute, display driving, human input.

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I worked for Keychron in the past, designing a new product. After making all those things,

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I really wanted to put everything together into this one cohesive package,

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and make it open source for everyone to see. I'm going to try to use the keyboard first,

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because we haven't even powered this on yet. I want to have that experience a little bit later.

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I want to connect the keyboard to my laptop. All right, great. So I would assume there's a pairing button somewhere.

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No, there isn't. There is not. There's no off button on this keyboard.

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It's always on. Wow. Yeah. Uh, good.

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Yeah. Of course, convenient. It is. Okay. It's always on.

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And the reason it can do that is because it's on ZMK. So it runs almost a year on a single charge.

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No way. Yeah, almost a year. I haven't charged it really since I built it.

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94% back. It even has battery life reporting.

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You got to be kidding me. Yeah. That is very cool.

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Also, I cheated a little bit while you were distracted. I pressed down on one of the keys.

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That is a shocking amount of travel. That's right.

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Considering how thin this thing is. Yep, yep. Like it's like it goes all the way down to the PCB.

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Every single slice of this keyboard has been designed to be as thin as possible.

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If someone brought this to me as a V1 prototype of a product,

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I'd be like, f***ing send it. Yeah. Because this is awesome.

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I don't know if you know this, but I'm actually a 915 TKL user.

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And what I love about it is that it's a desktop keyboard,

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but it's super low profile. And I love the feel of the keyswitches.

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I would say there's a little work to do on the profile of this before it was a retail product.

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But in terms of the feel, like what you've accomplished here is outstanding.

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Yes. Thank you so much.

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He knows it. Thank you, yeah. It has a shockingly typewriter-esque sound.

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Yeah. I actually kind of love it. Here, hold on. You got to kind of hear it up close.

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Like it almost, it has a bit of a clang, which in the mechanical keyboard space is not quote unquote desirable.

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But it does it in kind of a cool way. I guess my next question is how confident were you going into this

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that you would be able to build something resembling, like I said, I mistook it for my own machine, right?

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A real laptop. I'm calling mine a fake.

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No, I'm calling it not commercial. Ah, yeah, yeah.

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I set myself really, really high bars. Like I looked at a framework 13 and I looked at a 14-inch MacBook Pro.

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I tried to make as many comparisons as I could to them and accomplish as close as I possibly could.

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The confidence pretty much zero. Why don't we talk about the thing that really sets this machine apart

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from other DIY laptops? And that is the machined body.

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It's less flex than yours. Hold on, let's validate this.

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Okay. Okay, that's a lot of flex.

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Pretty good. I think that is less flex. I've never done that to it. I'm just too scared.

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Oh, it didn't break. So that's a, yeah, let's go.

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So in choosing the chassis design and the material

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and the anodization, I made a bunch of these cubes. Just half of the cubes I evaluated.

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And so in the end, I settled on this one. The reason I know it's this one is because I actually like milled into it.

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So I knew how malleable the metal was if I had to modify it later on.

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Oh, got it. So you were looking both at the finish and at the actual material

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because we say, oh, it's made of aluminum,

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but almost nothing is made of pure aluminum. It's made out of some aluminum alloy

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and they have very different properties potentially. The unibody design is quite special than a traditional laptop.

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The palm rest or the mid plate, as I call it, actually screws in from the top.

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And the reason stems from the actual keyboard being a removable detachable piece.

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So I wanted it to just slide right in and the most optimal way to do that would be

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by having the bottom completely screwless. There's nothing behind it. And you just machine out basically this bottom shell

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and then the top shell. And then you put framework hinges.

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This bit disclosure, right? Yeah. Yep. All right.

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You put these hinges in and you just, you know, it all comes together just like that.

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Obviously it's a function first design, but I want to have a quick philosophical conversation with you.

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Personally, I don't like seeing the function of a product harmed

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by this, I feel, irrational desire to hide screws.

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Do you think it's okay to just have some screws visible on something?

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Of course. I mean, why not? If you get to where you need to go, screws are the way.

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I also have duct tape there, you know. Okay. There's only two types of screws.

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There's only torques and Phillips on there. Nice and repairable.

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And now we're pulling up the CAD. So this is the bottom chassis itself.

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And no wonder it's so rigid. Yeah. It is fully CNC'd and...

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And heavy. What? It's a little heavy. Oh yeah.

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Oh yeah. Hefty. Yeah. Hefty. Yeah, I missed the F.

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Hefty. There's a lot of different parts that come fitting,

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that comes to fit into the actual chassis, including the two Framework 13 hinges.

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Yeah. And then so the powertrain board mounts right over here.

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Yeah. And then the actual main compute board, I call it the main board,

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or the motherboard, goes right here. Did you call it that? Did you come up with that term?

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No. Main board? I didn't. But I call it that.

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And then here we have four individual battery cells. And I wanted to make these battery cells separate.

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One for safety. I didn't want to blow up the entire laptop when I was sleeping.

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But it also allows me to build a custom battery pack

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so I can specify to however much I want. This can actually discharge 150 watts at any given moment.

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But obviously, it won't ever do that. But you know, just for this future. Not on a rock chip. Not on a rock chip.

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Here on the left side. Right. We have two USB-C 3.1 Gen2 ports.

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I don't have the firmware to support a external display on them just yet,

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but maybe in the future. In the many revisions I've made with the laptop, I actually have three separate designs for the main board.

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I switched from an HDMI, which didn't really work, and the signal integrity was a little off.

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I switched to a USB 2.0 port at the very end. Also, just because I'm mad that, you know,

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how can a MacBook not fit a USB 2.0, you know, a USB-A port?

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Yeah. And this is no thinner. This is all right. This is no thicker. Since we're at it,

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why don't we look at the rest of the aisle? You've got a microSD reader. Nice to see.

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Headphone jack. Doesn't work. Oh.

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Yeah, bad engineering. Oh. Yeah. It just didn't work. I don't know why.

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And then this is a power only input, right? Yes. So you cannot charge the battery from this side,

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I would assume. Fortunately not. The reason you can't charge from these USB-C ports

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is because I wanted to separate the compute and the power system so they individually function first to save the timeline.

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This looks great, by the way. This is very classy. Yeah. I really like that.

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So did you just take it to a third-party shop to have it machined out? I did. I got it CNC'd by JLC.

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It didn't cost that much. It only cost, what, $300 to $500?

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Really? For the entire chassis. Every metal piece combined. And that included the cost of the metal?

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Yes, it does. And the anodization. So it came to me fully blacked out already.

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Dude, I would have guessed over a thousand for sure. Do you want to take a guess at how much this laptop cost at R&D?

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Everything added up together? How are you calculating the R&D?

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What are you billing out at? Everything that I bought.

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Everything that I bought to make this laptop. So just parts? Just parts.

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Every failed revision. Every, you know, the mis-input. Everything that I had to buy because I burned it.

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All of that added up. So really, I should be looking more at you than at that

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because it's like, how much would he burn? How much would he destroy?

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A lot. I'm going to say... What?

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5K. You're spot on. It's about 4.8, 5K.

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Yeah. Yeah. I still got a big one. Oh my god. Yeah.

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Well, look, we've developed a number of products ourselves.

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So I have some idea of what the failure rates are like when you're trying to figure stuff out.

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This is a big moment. I get to turn it on now. I have expected it to make like a mac bone noise or something.

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I don't know if you're an Apple fan or whatever. The fan turns a little bit. There it goes.

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Oh dude, you got like a, you got like a splash screen and everything.

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That's cool. Thank you. I still remember when I set up my old machine when I was about your age to have a,

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to have a Jolly Roger for the Windows XP loading screen.

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And it said Windows XP Pirate Edition.

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I might not be alive for that.

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Okay, let's get through this video and then I retire.

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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.

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So there's metal in front of them? Yes. But metal and air are just, you know, the difference of molecules.

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I mean, yeah. Are you sure you wouldn't have considered maybe, you know, running them up here?

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Like they do on other laptops? Yeah, but I got lazy.

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From my past, having done 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz and RF engineering,

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it doesn't really matter if you're going through metal that much.

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All right, let's see this display. Okay, man, this display looks incredible.

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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?

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I was just looking through scrolling and I found this panel, the ATNA33TP11 from Samsung.

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That's the 4K AMOLED display panel you see here. It was on some old ASUS laptops from three, four years ago.

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And I really liked it because it looks so good and it looks awesome.

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And so I bought some of Taobao, the Chinese AliExpress basically.

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And the hard part was running it directly from the RK3588 over an embedded DisplayPort.

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Right, because here's the thing. Embedded DisplayPort theoretically is a standard, but everyone,

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both on the system side and the panel side, f***s around with it.

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So how did you get it working? Yeah, one sec.

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He's gone. He left. I mean, I broke his laptop, I guess.

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I kind of had it coming. When I first started the project, I chose this RK3588 system on a module.

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Yeah. So it slots into this felt and board. Just like that, you know, just pop it right in.

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Beautiful. I did it. Is this that thing that we featured, the little NAS thing? It is.

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You were the one that inspired it. Oh, oh, that's cool. Great.

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Nice little board and, you know, you can make it a laptop now. Yeah, it's a really cool little board.

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Now, when you talked about different pinouts, different protocols,

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OLED panels actually have a different pinout than LCDs.

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And since no one DIYs OLED panels, I had to reverse engineer them

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from a data dump on Linux from the ASUS laptop that used to have them.

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So after some reverse engineering and maybe procuring a data sheet,

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this is the cable that is needed to drive the display. Very, very fine-pitched 40-pin cable.

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And it's impedance matched to the EDP specifications.

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And that's at least one thing that they go by somewhat. Well, how do you source one of these?

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How do you know it's the right one? Yeah. So on Taobao, they actually sell OLED EDP cables.

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And so I just bought one and pray that it works.

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Unfortunately, it didn't really work because these cables actually convert from a standard LCD pinout to an OLED pinout,

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which is not what I actually want. Oh, because you want to go native. Yes, I want to go OLED to OLED.

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Yes. So then what did you have to do? So what I did was I made two of these boards.

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They look wildly different from one another, because one of them works and one of them doesn't.

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Can you guess which one works and which one doesn't, Linus? I'm going to say this one works.

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How did you know? Because it's just simply. He's right.

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He's right. So again, we've designed a couple of products.

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RF engineering is kind of black magic. So a lot of the signals you can't really probe,

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you just have to guess based on vibes. So my guess was that this was just too much loss.

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And it looks really, really cursed, plugging into HDMI.

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But actually, the RK3588 itself has a multiplexer inside the chip

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that takes either HDMI or embedded DisplayPort and sends it out.

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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.

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And then you went straight into here.

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Boom. Yeah. And after a lot of kernel development and a lot of device

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tree definition development, it just works. Plug it in and it just works as a native display.

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Let's talk about the trackpad. This thing feels great.

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Is this glass? It is glass. Glass topped.

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Man, everyone should just use a trackpad with a glass top like this.

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Sorry. What gesture did you want me to do? If you do three-finger like that, like on a MacBook.

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Hey, look at that.

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Oh, I love it. Fun fact, by the way, Linux had that like a decade before anyone else did.

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I have a spare trackpad right here. It's a module from Azotec.

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Azotec. Azotec. So they're an OEM trackpad manufacturer.

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I decided to just buy a module and modify it to fit within this laptop.

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They don't actually don't make it anymore. I think they were losing money selling them. It's too bad that they don't continue to sell them because

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for DIYers that DevKits can be an absolute lifesaver.

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I want to hear the speakers. Your speakers? They will shock you.

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What flavor of Linux are we on right now? Ubuntu.

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Yeah. You know, the crazy thing is if you press it down.

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I'm just, I'm just lit. Why am I so flush?

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It's like a twinge. I thought I was going to blow you away, right?

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Yeah, you didn't say if it was going to be in a good way or a bad way. So I certainly can't call you a liar then.

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Now, I have a question for you. You obviously are using an ARM-based chip for cost and power efficiency reasons

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and also because there's no way Intel is going to send you, you know, the drawings that you would need to develop an Intel-based laptop or whatever.

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Did you really feel like that was that much of a compromise these days?

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I think with the RK3588, it really wasn't that big of a compromise

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because you can do pretty much everything that you'd expect on a mid-low-end laptop.

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Of course, you can't play in a Baldur's Gate or something, but sure, you know, you can do, you know, regular everyday tasks on it, no problem.

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Theoretically, there is a project that's working on having Windows run on RK3588-based chips,

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but the development, it requires to support a custom hardware like mine,

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where I made a motherboard and I made the power system and driving the display.

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It required a lot of work to develop the firmware itself to boot the laptop

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and get it to a working state. That's super cool. I want to see Minecraft.

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So you said 4K60, I guess you meant 4K60 Hertz?

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Yes. Not 4K60 frames per second. Well, you see, if you look down at the ground, you get 60 FPS.

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I see. Yeah, but, you know, it's playable.

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It's playable, especially on Bedwars, high pixel where you're actually rendering a lot less than a world.

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You actually hit quite high frame rates. It looks great, right? It does, it does look great.

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There's no webcam. No. What was your reason, though?

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Well, publicly, it's for privacy.

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But honestly, it's just so difficult to implement something so thin.

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I didn't have the time and the capability to fit in a full webcam and run it through this entire display.

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And it's easy to complain about webcams. It's really hard to make a better one.

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I am playing video games right now on this laptop,

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which looks like a real laptop and obviously has some rough edges.

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Yep, it's falling apart a little. What would you say is your biggest specialty that helped you execute this?

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It's the, making these circuit boards myself.

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Yeah. And you can see here, he's got his own soak screening.

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This board here is clearly a lot smaller than the development board here.

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Got your own socketed M.2, your own socketed Wi-Fi module slot.

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The fact that this works is a small miracle.

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Are you doubting my skill, Linus? Nope. I'm saying that the fact that your skill exists is a small miracle.

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Thank you, thank you. I'm calling you a miracle. Take a compliment. Thank you, Linus.

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I appreciate it. Wow. And that's it.

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Sorry, I have this one, too. And then we just put the rock chip.

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That's it. Daughter board, brain board, whatever you want to call it.

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On there. Boom. Just like that.

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This is outstanding. Like the density here, I would be impressed if I saw this on a professional product,

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let alone no offense, but from like some kid.

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How many layers is this? Six layers. So I have the top and bottom layer for signal and power,

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the second two layers for impedance matching as a ground reference plane,

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and the middle two layers as power rails. So every trace on the high speed signaling, like the USB-C, USB-A, SD card,

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they are all impedance matched, and particularly the embedded DisplayPort

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signaling. Everything in this region is impedance controlled and impedance calculated,

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simulated, all of that to make sure that the signals don't get interfered with,

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on its way to whatever you need to do. And that stuff is a that stuff is a half.

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Like, wow. Now, the last question that I'm sure people are going to be asking is,

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this project obviously raised your profile a fair bit.

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Have you gotten any interesting job offers? Yeah. I can't disclose much, but I did get more job offers than the number of my hands,

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which is great. I'm super grateful for that. Yeah. And I got to make a video with you.

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Well, I mean, yeah. That's the best thing I got. Sure.

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Yeah, the guys who work here can see how excited they are about it.

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Wow. But I bet whoever gave them to him doesn't dance around topless like a firefighter.

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It's a little traumatizing. I can send you the design files for the circuit boards,

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because a lot of people wonder how you make circuit boards like this.

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Pretty much anyone can get a circuit board made. This costs at $60.

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$60. Yeah. Like it is shockingly affordable with this out of the way.

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What's your next big project? Yeah. So I have two projects that I'm trying I'm trying to get to right now.

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One is a super, super light mouse that doesn't have a battery.

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And I'm going to leave it at that. So it's super light. There's no battery, but it's wireless.

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Okay, no spoilers. You'll have to subscribe to this channel. What's the other one? I hopefully in the future I'll get to making a second revision of the laptop,

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or I'm going to have a better ship, better everything, and maybe, maybe get to making some kits.

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Yeah, that would actually be really cool. I mean, you've open sourced all of this, right?

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That's right. Everything you see on this table is completely open source on my GitHub.

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That's super cool. So we're going to have that linked in the video description.

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I love this keyboard. The keyboard, dude, this is really cool.

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This is a really cool showcase piece. You really like the keyboard. But this is, this is, this is a product.

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This is, that, that's, that's very cool.

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And you know what else is cool? If you guys enjoyed this video, then you will enjoy Byron's deeper look,

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which as I admitted before, I have only skimmed, but now I get to watch fully.

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And I'm really excited for that because he goes into a little bit more depth on some of the individual design choices,

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as well as like the specs, which we kind of glossed over here.

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So guys, you're going to want to check out his video. You're going to want to check out his GitHub.

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Is there anything else you want to shout out since you're here? Thank you to everyone for supporting me.

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Hi, Mom. Thank you for having me. Oh yeah, my pleasure, dude.

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All right.

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I'm really nice to meet you, man. Nice to meet you, guys.