Netbooks: The Form Factor Time Forgot

June 4, 2020 by Lewin Day 172 Comments

Long ago, before smartphones were ubiquitous and children in restaurants were quieted with awful games on iPads, there was a beautiful moment. A moment in which the end user could purchase, at a bargain price, an x86 computer in a compact, portable shell. In 2007, the netbook was born, and took the world by storm – only to suddenly vanish a few years later. What exactly was it that made netbooks so great, and where did they go?

A Beautiful Combination

An Asus EEE PC shown here running Linux. You could run anything on them! Because they were real, full-fat computers. No locked down chipsets or BIOS. Just good, clean, x86 fun.

The first machine to kick off the craze was the Asus EEE PC 701, inspired by the One Laptop Per Child project. Packing a 700Mhz Celeron processor, a small 7″ LCD screen, and a 4 GB SSD, it was available with Linux or Windows XP installed from the factory. With this model, Asus seemed to find a market that Toshiba never quite hit with their Libretto machines a decade earlier. The advent of the wireless network and an ever-more exciting Internet suddenly made a tiny, toteable laptop attractive, whereas previously it would have just been a painful machine to do work on. The name “netbook” was no accident, highlighting the popular use case — a lightweight, portable machine that’s perfect for web browsing and casual tasks.

But the netbook was more than the sum of its parts. Battery life was in excess of 3 hours, and the CPU was a full-fat x86 processor. This wasn’t a machine that required users to run special cut-down software or compromise on usage. Anything you could run on an average, low-spec PC, you could run on this, too. USB and VGA out were available, along with WiFi, so presentations were easy and getting files on and off was a cinch. It bears remembering, too, that back in the Windows XP days, it was easy to share files across a network without clicking through 7 different permissions tabs and typing in your password 19 times.

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Two Way Mirror Improves Video Conferencing

May 29, 2020 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Like everyone lately, [Matt] has been spending more time doing video conferencing lately. The problem is you naturally want to look at the screen, but that means you aren’t looking at the camera and, thus, you aren’t making eye contact. If you use a laptop, there is a relatively easy fix, although it isn’t particularly stylish. [Matt] built a black shroud out of foam board and put in two-way mirror. How does that help? Well, with the set up, you can put a very thin black web camera pointing up towards the mirror. Because the shroud is dark, you can see the screen through the mirror, but the camera sees you.

Where do you get a thin black web camera? You make one from an old laptop camera. They are tiny and easy to repurpose, a trick [Matt] has shared before. As a bonus, the post shows an easy way to take an LED strip and make a diffused light for lighting up your webcam call.

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Hacking Dell Laptops To Use Off-Brand Chargers

May 27, 2020 by Lewin Day 67 Comments

Dell, along with many other manufacturers, have begun to implement smart features into their laptop charging circuitry. This leaves the user out of luck if they wish to use an off-brand part, or get caught short when their original charger fails. [Neutrino] was in just such a position, and decided to hack around the problem.

The laptop verifies the identity of the attached charger by a third pin. This communicates with a One-Wire IC embedded in the charger, which reports the charger’s identity when queried by the laptop. When [Neutrino]’s charger broke, an attempt was made to use an off-brand charger, with the third pin hooked up to the original failed unit. This tricked the laptop into charging successfully.

For a more permanent workaround, [Neutrino] harvested the One-Wire IC from inside the original charger, and instead hooked it up inside the laptop, directly to the charge port. Thus, the laptop always thinks a Dell charger is connected when power is applied. There is some risk, in that if the user plugs in a lower-power charger than the original, there could be an overload event, but that’s just the risk inherent in the hack.

It’s a tidy workaround for an annoying problem that is all too common in the post-DRM world. Laptop chargers are often prime candidates for failure too; we’ve seen fixes as creative as repairing a Magsafe with a pistacchio nut before!

[Thanks to Levi for the tip]

Breathing New Life Into Old School ThinkPad Keyboards

May 26, 2020 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

The ThinkPad is generally considered the unofficial laptop of hackerdom, so it’s no surprise that we see plenty of projects focused on repairing and modifying these reliable workhorses. But while we usually see folks working on relatively modern incarnations of this iconic line of computers, this project by [Frank Adams] and [Brian Chan] shows that the hacker’s love affair with the ThinkPad stretches back farther than many might realize.

As explained on the project’s Hackaday.io page, the duo have produced an open hardware board that will allow you to take the keyboard and trackpoint from a late ’90s ThinkPad 380ED and use it as a standard USB input device on a modern computer. According to [Frank], the keyboards on these machines are notable for having full-size keys rather than the “chicklet” boards that are so common today.

Now you may be wondering why this is significant. After all, we’ve seen plenty of projects that hook up an old keyboard to a USB-equipped microcontroller to get them speaking the lingua franca. Well, the trick here is that the trackpoint on these older ThinkPads actually required additional circuitry on the motherboard to function. The keyboard features three separate FPC connections for the matrix, the trackpoint buttons, and the analog strain gauges in the trackpoint itself.

After a considerable amount of reverse engineering, [Frank] and [Brian] have developed a board that uses the Teensy 3.2 to turn this plethora of pins into something useful. In the video after the break, you can see the new composite USB device working perfectly on a modern Windows computer.

It will probably come as little surprise to find that [Frank] is no stranger to hacking ThinkPad keyboards. In 2018 we covered a similar adapter he built for the far more modern T61, which was an absolute cakewalk by comparison.

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DIY Magsafe Charger Feeds Off 12 V Solar Battery

April 19, 2020 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

[Steve Chamberlin] has a spiffy solar-charged 12 V battery that he was eager to use to power his laptop, but ran into a glitch. His MacBook Pro uses Apple’s MagSafe 2 connector for power, but plugging the AC adapter into the battery via a 110 VAC inverter seemed awfully inefficient. It would be much better to plug it into the battery directly, but that also was a problem. While Apple has a number of DC power adapters intended for automotive use, none exist for the MagSafe 2 connector [Steve]’s mid-2014 MacBook Pro uses. His solution was to roll his own MagSafe charger with 12 VDC input.

Since MagSafe connectors are proprietary, his first duty was to salvage one from a broken wall charger. After cleaning up the wires and repairing any frayed bits, it was time to choose a DC-DC converter to go between the MagSafe connector and the battery. The battery is nominally 12 volts, so the input of the DC-DC converter was easy to choose, but the output was a bit uncertain. Figuring out what the MagSafe connector expects took a little educated guesswork.

The original AC adapter attached to the charger claimed an output of 20 volts, another Apple adapter claimed a 14.85 V output, and a third-party adapter said 16.5 volts. [Steve] figured that the MagSafe connectors seemed fine with anything in the 15 to 20 V range, so it would be acceptable to use a 12 V to 19 V DC-DC boost converter which he had available. The result worked just fine, and [Steve] took measurements to verify that it is in fact much more efficient than had he took the easy way out with the inverter.

MagSafe has been displaced by USB-C nowadays, but there are plenty of MagSafe devices still kicking around. In a pinch, keep in mind that a little bit of filing or grinding is all that’s needed to turn MagSafe 1 into MagSafe 2.

Replacing A Non-Replacable Laptop Keyboard

December 23, 2019 by Lewin Day 30 Comments

Spilling a drink on a laptop is a terrifying experience. If you’re lucky you’ll ruin just a keyboard, and if not, your entire machine could go up in smoke. Assuming you’ve just suffered the latter, you can still be out of luck, as many laptops come with fancy integrated keyboards that are not designed to be removable. It’s not always the case however, as this ingenious hack from [InsideMyLaptop] bears out.

The hack begins with removing the top case assembly from a HP Pavilion laptop. The keyboard is riveted into the top plate assembly, along with the trackpad, which would normally necessitate their replacement as a total unit. However, if properly armed with a soldering iron, these plastic rivets can be melted to allow the backing plate and keyboard to be removed. A replacement part can then be sourced, and the remaining rivet stubs can be remelted to hold the new part in place.

It’s a simple hack, but one that goes to show one shouldn’t always take “No User Servicable Parts Inside” as an answer. We’ve seen other useful work from [InsideMyLaptop] before – like this power jack repair way back in 2011.

Recreating Lord Nikon’s Laptop From Hackers

October 15, 2019 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

The outlandish computers from 1995’s Hackers are easily one of the most memorable elements of the iconic cult classic. In the film, each machine is customized to reflect the individual hacker that operates it, and feature everything from spray painted camouflage paint schemes to themed boot animations based on the owner’s personal iconography. But what might not be so obvious is that the real-life props took a considerable amount of hardware hacking before they were ready for their big-screen debut.

A group of dedicated Hackers fans have created a website to document, and ideally recreate, all the custom work that went into the various pieces of tech featured in the film. As explained by [Nandemoguy], the group’s latest triumph is a screen-accurate build of Lord Nikon’s laptop. The final product not only looks just like the machine used in the film, but thanks to the internal Raspberry Pi, is far more powerful than the original computer would have been.

Unless you’re on the team over at HackersCurator.com, you might not know that the laptops in the film were handmade chimeras that combined the external cases of various PCs with (usually) the internals of an Apple Powerbook 180c. Why the prop masters of the film would have gone through so much trouble to create the character’s computers is not immediately clear, but if we had to guess, presumably it was due to the requirements of the over-the-top graphical interfaces that are featured so heavily in the film.

At any rate, the replica created by [Nandemoguy] is built in much the same way. At least for the parts you can see on the outside, anyway. He goes through the considerable case modifications required to replace the original keyboard on the Toshiba Satellite T1850 with a Powerbook keyboard, which as you might have guessed, has been converted into a USB HID device with a Teensy microcontroller. He even cuts the ports off the back of the Mac’s motherboard and glues them in place around the backside of the machine. But everything else, including the LCD, is all new hardware. After all, who really wants to go through all that trouble just to have a fancy Powerbook 180c in 2019?

Even if you weren’t a fan of Hackers, the level of detail and effort put into this build it absolutely phenomenal. It’s interesting to see the parallels between this replica and the burgeoning cyberdeck scene; it seems like with a Teensy, a Raspberry Pi, and enough Bondo, anything can be turned into a functional computer.

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