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Ingredients part 1

A project log for Scraptop

Laptop made out of scrap - Combined with a FairPhone2 a possible step in the journey toward a fair laptop.

ronaldRonald 06/17/2017 at 19:580 Comments

The ingredients until now are:

- a Fair phone 2
- an USB OTG 3 port hub with combined card reader (just because this was the one I could find 2nd hand... :))
- a Lenovo Displaylink USB to DVI adapter
- a laptop that's too old to run windows, and has too unsupported hardware to run Ubuntu. Perfect for scrap heap... or this project.
- for now, a mouse and a keyboard to test all

# su
# wm density 240 (or 160)
# wm size (have to find out exact size of monitor)

...gives a much better look on a large screen. density 160 makes my launcher crash, but would mean that a 'density indepentent pixel' is equal to a real pixel. Normal density is 480 for this (and most Android HD) screens.

Without rebooting, some parts of Android are a little bit confused.

Good! Basics are working.

[edit] - the pan in a schematical view:

From the insides of the laptop case, the old electronics can be removed. They will be replaced by a custom keyboard driver board (AnyHKBD) which will be created in this project. The TFT will be driven by a chain of USB-DVI and DVI-LVDS boards - hopefully. An USB OTG hub will make everything connect to the phone. All should nicely fit in the empty shell.

As for the trackpad... who needs that, we have vim, right? ;-) This will be solved later. A trackball is also an option, or something PS/2 connected to an USB-PS/2 adapter. For now, I'll focus on the other parts.

Next steps:
- USB to keyboard adapter, I'll probably make this with an ATMega8 or 16 and V-USB. Have to decide what project to pick as a base for this.
- Find out if I can drive the LCD of this laptop with some DVI to LVDS driver board from eBay.


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