I want to tell you a story… I skimmed your laptop.txt and found no pictures. I went to back to the parent… menu, still didn’t find any pictures.
So I decided to contact you and ask for pics! I was just about to ssh into a tilde and weechat into the local ircd to ask who knows much about gopher when I realized that whoever responded would just browse your whole hole to find contact information–and I can do that, the floodgap proxy works fine from work.
AND, your guestbook works. :) My message was delivered already, well before I tapped out this rambling, pointless message. Cheers! p.s. send laptop pics
Oh shit, it was a Gopher! Given a prior thread, I guess this one should be on list for coolest, modern Gophersites. The FloodGap homepage is itself really neat, too.
Running a gopher hole is pretty easy. I run mine off pygopherd, which is nice in that it will turn directories into gophermaps with type hinting, but if you plan to write your own maps a gopher server is only a handful of lines of code.
Now that you mention it, I do need to take pictures. My email is dabmancer@dread.life, for anyone interested (I did not get your email if you sent one already). I’ll try to respond to every email that I get (and also be helpful). I’m glad the stuff works. The whole point of gopher is that it’s too simple to go wrong.
The Gopher proxy is neat! Would be good to see a picture, though.
As someone who has designed hardware I was a little disappointed that “from scratch” means “from an SBC and some off the shelf modules”. I was hoping for another Novena-like project. This is very accessible, though, which is awesome.
preferably not from China. China < Taiwan < Korea < Japan < USA in terms of reliability
This seems like an unnecessary generalisation. Yes, you can buy dirt cheap stuff from China and often that stuff is rubbish quality. You can also buy good quality stuff from China (just maybe not on Aliexpress for $0.50 with Free Shipping). You’ll also probably find a lot of the things you order from a “USA” vendor is made in China, or assembled from parts made in China.
Wire all those batteries in parallel. Soldering them will take some work, but
don’t give up. You might break some batteries. Don’t charge or discharge the
batteries too much when soldering, or you will reduce the battery life. Watch
out for electric shocks, especially considering that soldering irons are
conductive. Some people have had better luck with welding the batteries than
soldering them.
I’m glad this worked for you, but telling people to solder Lithium cells (especially in an environment where they may short them) is very dangerous advice. You’re not supposed to ever solder these. At best you may damage the cell, at worst you may damage the cell in a way which leads to a fire.
Connecting random Li-Ion cells in parallel is also potentially risky. Battery pack manufacturers match the cells closely to avoid mismatch problems. If someone following your instructions hasn’t correctly equalised the cell voltages ahead of time then the connection may lead to dangerously high inrush currents (basically a short) as the cells try to equalise voltage. Differences in internal resistance can lead to uneven charging. Again, I’m glad it worked for you but it’s not safe advice to be handing out. More information can be found here.
You’ve got excellent points. You’re right about “China < Taiwan < Korea < Japan < USA in terms of reliability” being a generalization. I’m typing this on a ThinkPad X60T (a Chinese product), which is one of the best laptops I’ve ever had, but that is the exception and not the rule. I included the advice because I would have liked to hear it repeatedly before multiple electronics projects. I would have saved money by getting stuff that worked from the get-go.
I used batteries from another battery pack, which was still functioning, but didn’t have the thing it powered anymore. The battery cells still had the nickel strips on them, but they were not in the arrangement I needed. Your advice is correct, and I shouldn’t assume that people have that optimal setup. Maybe I should just tell people to cut away what they need from an ebike battery or something. I will definitely add that the cells should be from the same batch, as that is something I forgot to mention.
I would love to make a laptop that is really “from scratch” one day. I’m thinking of making something like an e-ink display, but instead of being eletrostatic, it would be magnetic (I don’t know if it would even work). Send me an email if you want details (dabmancer@dread.life). Since keyboards are pretty simple; I would probably get away with a good pcb without spending too much money. A motherboard, on the other hand, is something I don’t know how to cheaply get just one of. If you know some place that could do it, please email me (dabmancer@dread.life). I don’t suspect to get this done within the next few years.
Edit: It is much more important that the batteries are the same type when putting them in series than in parallel, though you still have a point.
I like the design and the fact they use an LVDS screen (which opens up the possibility of using a decent driver board. The plywood chassics looks like it would be flimsy, and the boder around the keys doesn’t go all the way up, which means that if you drop the keyboard, you scuff the keys, and maybe pop off some plywood.
There is an easier solution to the bus ergonomics issue than making a computer. You just put a keyboard behind a regular tablet on your lap. It’s ergonomically very good. I drew a picture (pardon my artistic ability). http://dread.life/pics/arrangement.png
I did this quite some time with an iPad mini and a Bluetooth keyboard but the neck position was really aweful… Maybe having something to fix the tablet on top of the keyboard would help.
Yeah, it looks a little lacking on the ergonomic side of things. I’d wonder if a flip up or maybe goose neck attached screen would make it more comfortable.
Is there a good reason you added additional batteries to the USB charger circuitry? I have several of these that will run a Pi for 8 hours, & if you stick them in series you can get them to run for at least 12 on a full charge. (This is what I did for my wearable computer project, which had a smaller display and therefore probably drew much less power, but I’ve never had a professionally-manufactured laptop whose battery life was much more than 2 hours at best.)
I originally decided to use an allwinner A80-powered banana pi M3, which is known for regularly consuming more than 2 AMPS. Also, a 13.3” panel consumes quite a bit of power (Usually, the backlight consumes a similar amount of power as the CPU). If I wanted to get a decent battery life, I needed to get a lot of batteries. Also, I like a lot of battery life. I did not actually use the multiple 18650s in a single battery charger in a practical application yet. I’m getting another lobste.rs user to try that out soon (so I don’t have to spend more money). If by sticking the battery chargers “in series,” you mean having one charge the other, which charges the other, and so on, then that would be “in parallel,” electrically speaking. It would also waste a small amount of power, since lithium-ion batteries will only give out about 3/4 the power put in.
Your project looks cool. What display did you use for it? What display would you use if you were going to do it again today?
It would also waste a small amount of power, since lithium-ion batteries will only give out about 3/4 the power put in.
Yup. But, since I was mostly concerned with battery life & avoiding soldering, this made sense to me. I do the same with UPSes.
What display did you use for it? What display would you use if you were going to do it again today?
Adafruit used to sell low-end video glasses for about a hundred bucks. I modded them – basically, removed one of the two displays and re-mounted it in a pair of welding goggles. This changed the distance between my eye and the display, but I found that if I mounted the lens inside the googles and the display outside and then mounted the lens backward I got approximately the same visual clarity as I had with the original mount. It took about an hour to perform the mod, and I managed to do it on my first try, so it’s an easy one.
Unfortunately, I discovered that maintaining a different focus with one eye than with another is difficult – in other words, if I was walking around and looking at the world in front of me, I couldn’t at the same time see the display. I also found that the display was hard to read if I was in a bright environment without the other eye occluded.
The version I have now uses a Glyph as a display (which is a lot more expensive, but is at least rain resistant and has its own battery power) and the newer smaller Raspberry Pi. The Glyph occludes both eyes, but I found that was basically necessary to use the thing anyway. It’s more comfortable (marginally), has approximately the same visual clarity (although it actually has optical adjustments), and doesn’t have the same problem with fogging in high-humidity situations as the goggle-mount display did because the area between the head and the display isn’t enclosed.
How do you run your proprietary stuff at your $dayjob then? (It could be Photoshop, M$O, your company app or just some closed source embedded SDK as well)
I should clarify what I meant by ‘targeting’. I don’t own any desktop-class ARM machines yet, just SBCs. I’m almost done with my LFS VM (on an AMD64 host), which I’ll use to get started on Cross-LFS.
Hi, dabmancer.
I want to tell you a story… I skimmed your
laptop.txtand found no pictures. I went to back to the parent… menu, still didn’t find any pictures.So I decided to contact you and ask for pics! I was just about to ssh into a tilde and weechat into the local ircd to ask who knows much about gopher when I realized that whoever responded would just browse your whole hole to find contact information–and I can do that, the floodgap proxy works fine from work.
AND, your guestbook works. :) My message was delivered already, well before I tapped out this rambling, pointless message. Cheers! p.s. send laptop pics
I didn’t realize I was reading this through a Gopher proxy until I read this comment. I just though I was on a mailing list reader.
I really should setup a gopher server to serve up all the content on my website, in a Docker container, just because I can.
I wrote my own gopher server mainly to mirror my blog to gopherspace. It wasn’t that hard.
Oh shit, it was a Gopher! Given a prior thread, I guess this one should be on list for coolest, modern Gophersites. The FloodGap homepage is itself really neat, too.
Running a gopher hole is pretty easy. I run mine off pygopherd, which is nice in that it will turn directories into gophermaps with type hinting, but if you plan to write your own maps a gopher server is only a handful of lines of code.
Making your own gopher server is an afternoon of work or so. That’s what I did for the server.
Now that you mention it, I do need to take pictures. My email is dabmancer@dread.life, for anyone interested (I did not get your email if you sent one already). I’ll try to respond to every email that I get (and also be helpful). I’m glad the stuff works. The whole point of gopher is that it’s too simple to go wrong.
I don’t really understand but I still suspect this is the most awesome thing I’ll read all week.
The Gopher proxy is neat! Would be good to see a picture, though.
As someone who has designed hardware I was a little disappointed that “from scratch” means “from an SBC and some off the shelf modules”. I was hoping for another Novena-like project. This is very accessible, though, which is awesome.
This seems like an unnecessary generalisation. Yes, you can buy dirt cheap stuff from China and often that stuff is rubbish quality. You can also buy good quality stuff from China (just maybe not on Aliexpress for $0.50 with Free Shipping). You’ll also probably find a lot of the things you order from a “USA” vendor is made in China, or assembled from parts made in China.
I’m glad this worked for you, but telling people to solder Lithium cells (especially in an environment where they may short them) is very dangerous advice. You’re not supposed to ever solder these. At best you may damage the cell, at worst you may damage the cell in a way which leads to a fire.
Connecting random Li-Ion cells in parallel is also potentially risky. Battery pack manufacturers match the cells closely to avoid mismatch problems. If someone following your instructions hasn’t correctly equalised the cell voltages ahead of time then the connection may lead to dangerously high inrush currents (basically a short) as the cells try to equalise voltage. Differences in internal resistance can lead to uneven charging. Again, I’m glad it worked for you but it’s not safe advice to be handing out. More information can be found here.
You’ve got excellent points. You’re right about “China < Taiwan < Korea < Japan < USA in terms of reliability” being a generalization. I’m typing this on a ThinkPad X60T (a Chinese product), which is one of the best laptops I’ve ever had, but that is the exception and not the rule. I included the advice because I would have liked to hear it repeatedly before multiple electronics projects. I would have saved money by getting stuff that worked from the get-go.
I used batteries from another battery pack, which was still functioning, but didn’t have the thing it powered anymore. The battery cells still had the nickel strips on them, but they were not in the arrangement I needed. Your advice is correct, and I shouldn’t assume that people have that optimal setup. Maybe I should just tell people to cut away what they need from an ebike battery or something. I will definitely add that the cells should be from the same batch, as that is something I forgot to mention.
I would love to make a laptop that is really “from scratch” one day. I’m thinking of making something like an e-ink display, but instead of being eletrostatic, it would be magnetic (I don’t know if it would even work). Send me an email if you want details (dabmancer@dread.life). Since keyboards are pretty simple; I would probably get away with a good pcb without spending too much money. A motherboard, on the other hand, is something I don’t know how to cheaply get just one of. If you know some place that could do it, please email me (dabmancer@dread.life). I don’t suspect to get this done within the next few years.
Edit: It is much more important that the batteries are the same type when putting them in series than in parallel, though you still have a point.
I really liked this laptop someone made for commuting, also Raspberry Pi based but with a unique form factor making it easier to use in tight spots.
I like the design and the fact they use an LVDS screen (which opens up the possibility of using a decent driver board. The plywood chassics looks like it would be flimsy, and the boder around the keys doesn’t go all the way up, which means that if you drop the keyboard, you scuff the keys, and maybe pop off some plywood.
There is an easier solution to the bus ergonomics issue than making a computer. You just put a keyboard behind a regular tablet on your lap. It’s ergonomically very good. I drew a picture (pardon my artistic ability). http://dread.life/pics/arrangement.png
I did this quite some time with an iPad mini and a Bluetooth keyboard but the neck position was really aweful… Maybe having something to fix the tablet on top of the keyboard would help.
It’s a cool build, but I can’t see how you would use that for more than a few minutes without being painfully contorted.
Yeah, it looks a little lacking on the ergonomic side of things. I’d wonder if a flip up or maybe goose neck attached screen would make it more comfortable.
Is there a good reason you added additional batteries to the USB charger circuitry? I have several of these that will run a Pi for 8 hours, & if you stick them in series you can get them to run for at least 12 on a full charge. (This is what I did for my wearable computer project, which had a smaller display and therefore probably drew much less power, but I’ve never had a professionally-manufactured laptop whose battery life was much more than 2 hours at best.)
I originally decided to use an allwinner A80-powered banana pi M3, which is known for regularly consuming more than 2 AMPS. Also, a 13.3” panel consumes quite a bit of power (Usually, the backlight consumes a similar amount of power as the CPU). If I wanted to get a decent battery life, I needed to get a lot of batteries. Also, I like a lot of battery life. I did not actually use the multiple 18650s in a single battery charger in a practical application yet. I’m getting another lobste.rs user to try that out soon (so I don’t have to spend more money). If by sticking the battery chargers “in series,” you mean having one charge the other, which charges the other, and so on, then that would be “in parallel,” electrically speaking. It would also waste a small amount of power, since lithium-ion batteries will only give out about 3/4 the power put in.
Your project looks cool. What display did you use for it? What display would you use if you were going to do it again today?
Yup. But, since I was mostly concerned with battery life & avoiding soldering, this made sense to me. I do the same with UPSes.
Adafruit used to sell low-end video glasses for about a hundred bucks. I modded them – basically, removed one of the two displays and re-mounted it in a pair of welding goggles. This changed the distance between my eye and the display, but I found that if I mounted the lens inside the googles and the display outside and then mounted the lens backward I got approximately the same visual clarity as I had with the original mount. It took about an hour to perform the mod, and I managed to do it on my first try, so it’s an easy one.
Unfortunately, I discovered that maintaining a different focus with one eye than with another is difficult – in other words, if I was walking around and looking at the world in front of me, I couldn’t at the same time see the display. I also found that the display was hard to read if I was in a bright environment without the other eye occluded.
The version I have now uses a Glyph as a display (which is a lot more expensive, but is at least rain resistant and has its own battery power) and the newer smaller Raspberry Pi. The Glyph occludes both eyes, but I found that was basically necessary to use the thing anyway. It’s more comfortable (marginally), has approximately the same visual clarity (although it actually has optical adjustments), and doesn’t have the same problem with fogging in high-humidity situations as the goggle-mount display did because the area between the head and the display isn’t enclosed.
And now, let’s do the same but with x86_64 for better compatibility, as desktop world is currently not yet ready for ARM64.
I’m targeting ARM64 for my desktops now because it seems to be the future.
How do you run your proprietary stuff at your $dayjob then? (It could be Photoshop, M$O, your company app or just some closed source embedded SDK as well)
On hardware issued by $work.
I should clarify what I meant by ‘targeting’. I don’t own any desktop-class ARM machines yet, just SBCs. I’m almost done with my LFS VM (on an AMD64 host), which I’ll use to get started on Cross-LFS.