Ask HN: What would it take to build my own laptop from scratch?

1 points by greggyb 10y ago ↗ HN

Note up front: this is much more of a curiosity thing, unless it turns out to be surprisingly realistic to put together my own.

I'm curious what it would take to put together a laptop from scratch, from start to finish, and an estimate of the cost to build a one-off custom laptop. I realize that this is incredibly broad (perhaps too much so?). The conventional wisdom is that building your own desktop is cheaper than buying a pre-built workstation, and more practical because you can spec it to exactly your needs and not pay for what you don't want. The conventional wisdom with laptops is that it is impractical to put one together on your own, so you're stuck paying for whatever comes included with what you need.

One thought that occurs to me (but I don't want to limit the conversation to just this) would be to hack together a frame around a Raspberry Pi-esque SoC with a screen. What would peripherals cost around one of these?

2 comments

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jeffmould 10y ago ↗

I assume you are talking about buying parts and putting them together in one laptop case to have a custom laptop built to your spec. It can be done, and is actually not as hard as you would think. You can easily buy laptop motherboards, memory, hard drives, on sites like Newegg. Your hard part is going to be finding the case. Due to space constraints you really need a case that is designed to fit the type of motherboard, memory, and drive configuration. I think you would have two options here. The easiest would be to simply buy a case online. The other way would be to find a laptop that you could rip the inside out of and use that casing. I've never used this site, but a quick search turned this site up which could be helpful: http://www.laptopking.com/

Gibbon1 10y ago ↗

It's not an impossible task as long as you're not talking about making the highly engineered parts from scratch. Or to put it this way as long as you don't go too far down the technology stack.

You can for instance take a Beagle Bone Black, add an LCD 'cape' and a gob standard USB keyboard and have a functional Linux computer. Laying out a custom ARM mother board using a reference platform is doable, since I've done it for work. You are talking about probably $10-20k and two months of work though.

You could also have an SLA case made. If you did the 3D design yourself, the cost would be about $1000.