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 pro-right to repair,
I am so here for it every single time. I even invested my own money and framework to show my support for the dream.
But alas, a dream it 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, custom designed, built, and open sourced his own ARM-powered laptop in just six months.
And it's a shockingly potent machine. I'm talking a 4K AMOLED screen, Cherry MX 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.
I mean, have you seen my first videos? Obviously, I had to meet this guy, so hang on one second.
Hey Byron, Zoom is just so impersonal. So I flew Byron out here so I could check out the...
Anyonee? Yes, Anyonee. Yes, in person.
And my first question for you is, do you dance? I do.
Really? Do you know the... Here, do you know the segue?
Didn't notice how bad the quality was. It's 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 in?
No, it's all right. Because I think I have the perfect tool for you. What is it?
What are you talking about? A screwdriver from LTTStore.com? Yeah, let's go.
My first and maybe most important question is why?
When I set out to 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 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 still could. 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, I know it's Cherry MX. That's right.
I know that it was custom made, including the keycaps.
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 yeah, when I can't focus on the performance of the chip itself,
I'm limited to, you know, a crappy Rockship 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,
because 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, keyboard, compute, display driving, human input.
I worked for Keychron 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,
because 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 somewhere.
No, there isn't. There is not. There's no off button on this keyboard.
It's always on. Wow. Yeah. Uh, good.
Yeah. Of course, convenient. It is. Okay. It's always on.
And the reason it can do that is because 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 built it.
94% back. It even has battery life reporting.
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 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, f***ing send it. Yeah. Because 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 super low profile. And I love the feel of the keyswitches.
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. Thank you so much.
He knows it. Thank you, yeah. It has a shockingly typewriter-esque sound.
Yeah. I actually kind of love it. Here, hold on. 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, 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 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.
It'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 less flex. I've never done that to it. I'm just too scared.
Oh, it didn't break. So that's a, yeah, let's go.
So in choosing the chassis design and the material
and the anodization, I made a bunch of these cubes. Just 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 because 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 reason stems from the actual keyboard being a removable detachable piece.
So I wanted it to just slide right in and the most optimal 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 bit disclosure, right? Yeah. Yep. All right.
You put these hinges in and you just, you know, it all comes together just like that.
Obviously 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.
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.
There's only torques 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 CNC'd and...
And heavy. What? It's a little heavy. Oh yeah.
Oh yeah. Hefty. Yeah. Hefty. Yeah, I missed the F.
Hefty. 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. Did you call it that? Did you come up with that term?
No. Main board? I didn't. But I call it that.
And then here we have four individual battery cells. And I wanted to make these battery cells separate.
One for safety. I didn't want to blow up 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 this future. Not on a rock chip. Not on a rock chip.
Here on the left side. Right. We have two USB-C 3.1 Gen2 ports.
I don't have the firmware to support a external display on them just yet,
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.
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. Also, just because I'm mad that, you know,
how can a MacBook not fit a USB 2.0, you know, a USB-A port?
Yeah. And this is no thinner. This is all right. This is no thicker. Since we're at it,
why don't we look at the rest of the aisle? You've got a microSD 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? Yes. So you cannot charge the battery from this side,
I would assume. Fortunately not. The reason you can't charge from these USB-C 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'd by JLC.
It didn't cost that much. It only cost, 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.
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?
Everything added up together? How are you calculating the R&D?
What are you billing out at? Everything that I bought.
Everything that I bought to make this laptop. So just parts? Just parts.
Every failed revision. Every, you know, the mis-input. Everything that I had to buy because 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 about 4.8, 5K.
Yeah. Yeah. I still got a big one. 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 a big moment. I get to turn it on now. I have expected it to make like a mac bone noise or something.
I don't know if you're an Apple fan or whatever. The fan turns a little 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,
to have a Jolly Roger 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. But metal and air are just, you know, the difference of molecules.
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 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz and RF engineering,
it doesn't really matter if you're going through 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 ATNA33TP11 from Samsung.
That's the 4K AMOLED display panel you see here. It was on some old ASUS laptops from three, four years ago.
And I really liked it because it looks so good and it looks awesome.
And so I bought some of Taobao, the Chinese AliExpress basically.
And the hard part was running it directly from the RK3588 over an embedded DisplayPort.
Right, because here's the thing. Embedded DisplayPort theoretically is a standard, but everyone,
both on the system side and the panel side, f***s 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 felt and board. Just like that, you know, just pop it right in.
Beautiful. I did it. Is this 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 it a laptop now. Yeah, it's a really cool little board.
Now, when you talked about different pinouts, different protocols,
OLED panels actually have a different pinout 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 some reverse engineering and maybe procuring a data sheet,
this is the cable that is needed to drive the display. Very, very fine-pitched 40-pin cable.
And it's impedance matched to the EDP specifications.
And that's at least one thing that they go by somewhat. Well, how do you source one of these?
How do you know it's the right one? Yeah. So on Taobao, they actually sell 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 pinout to an OLED pinout,
which is not what I actually want. Oh, because you want to go native. Yes, I want to go OLED to 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, Linus? I'm going to say this one works.
How did you know? Because it's just simply. He's right.
He's right. So again, we've designed a couple of 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 it looks really, really cursed, plugging into HDMI.
But actually, the RK3588 itself has a multiplexer inside the chip
that takes either HDMI or embedded DisplayPort and sends it out.
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 then you went straight into here.
Boom. Yeah. And after a lot of kernel development and a lot of device
tree definition 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.
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 do? If you do three-finger like that, like on a MacBook.
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 Azotec.
Azotec. Azotec. 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. It's too bad that they don't continue to sell them because
for DIYers that DevKits can be an absolute lifesaver.
I want to hear the speakers. Your speakers? They will shock you.
What flavor of Linux are we on right now? Ubuntu.
Yeah. You know, the crazy thing is if you press it down.
I'm just, I'm just lit. Why am I so flush?
It's like a twinge. I thought 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. So I certainly can't call you a liar then.
Now, I have a question for you. You obviously are using an ARM-based chip for cost and power efficiency reasons
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.
Did you really feel like that was that much of a compromise these days?
I think with the RK3588, 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 in a Baldur'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 a custom hardware like mine,
where I made a motherboard and I made the power system and driving the display.
It required a lot of work 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 4K60, I guess you meant 4K60 Hertz?
Yes. Not 4K60 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, high pixel 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 this entire 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 soak 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, Linus? 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, Linus.
I appreciate it. Wow. And that's it.
Sorry, I have this one, too. And then we just put the rock chip.
That's it. Daughter board, brain board, whatever you want to call it.
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 USB-C, USB-A, SD card,
they are all impedance matched, and particularly the embedded DisplayPort
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 you need to do. And that stuff is a that stuff is 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 more job offers than the number of my hands,
which is great. I'm super grateful for that. Yeah. And I got to make a video with you.
Well, I mean, yeah. That's the best thing I got. Sure.
Yeah, the guys who work here can see how excited they are about it.
Wow. 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 costs at $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 that 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. So it's super light. There's no battery, but it's wireless.
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,
or I'm going to have a better ship, 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. 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 keyboard, dude, this is really cool.
This is a really cool showcase piece. You really like the keyboard. But this is, this is, this is a product.
This is, that, that's, that's very cool.
And you know what else is cool? 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.
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.
All right.
I'm really nice to meet you, man. Nice to meet you, guys.