This Is Not A Laptop, It’s A KVM Combo

August 19, 2024 by Donald Papp 58 Comments

A spare monitor and keyboard are handy things to have around, but they’re a bit of a hassle. They are useful for hardware development, plugging in to headless servers, or firing up a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer (SBC). If that’s something you do and portability and storage space are important to you, then you may be interested in the CrowView Note.

I got an opportunity to test and provide feedback on an early version of this unusual device, which is functionally a portable spare monitor plus keyboard (and touchpad) without the bulk and extra cables. Heck, it’s even giving me ideas as the guts of a Cyberdeck build. Let’s take a look.

What It Is

It really looks like a laptop, but it’s actually a 14″ 1920 x 1280 monitor and USB keyboard in a laptop form factor.

There is also an integrated trackpad, speakers and mic, and a rechargeable battery. That makes it capable of providing its own power, and it can even function as a power bank in a pinch. There’s an HDMI input on one side, and on the other is a full-featured USB-C port that accepts video input via the DisplayPort altmode.

Pictured here is a Raspberry Pi 5 with optional PCB adapter to eliminate cables. The three ports (HDMI in, USB-C 5 V out, and USB-A for peripherals) provide all the board needs.

The CrowView Note is a pretty useful device for a workbench where one is often plugging hardware in for development or testing, because there’s no need to manage a separate monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

It is not a laptop, but attaching an SBC like a Raspberry Pi makes it act like one. The three ports conveniently located on the left-hand side (HDMI in, USB-C out for power to the SBC, and USB-A in for peripherals like keyboard and trackpad) are all that are needed in this case. Elecrow offers a “cable eliminator” PCB adapters to make the process of connecting a Raspberry Pi 5 or a Jetson Nano as simple as possible. The result is something that looks and works just like a laptop.

Well, almost. The SBC will still be a separate piece of hardware, whether connected by cables or by one of Elecrow’s PCB adapters. The result is OK for bench work, but especially in the case of the PCB adapter, not particularly rugged. Still, it’s a nice option and makes working on such boards convenient and cable-free.

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DIY Gaming Laptop Built Entirely With Desktop Parts

August 13, 2024 by Lewin Day 23 Comments

Gaming laptops often tend towards implementing more desktop-like hardware in the pursuit of pure grunt. But what if you were to simply buy desktop hardware yourself, and build your own gaming laptop? That would be very cool, as [Socket Science] demonstrates for us all.

The project began with lofty goals. The plan wasn’t to build something rough and vaguely laptop-like. [Socket Science] wanted to build something of genuine quality, that for all intents and purposes, looked and worked like a proper commercial-grade laptop. Getting to that point took a full 14 months, but the final results are impressive.

Under the hood lies an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and a XFX Radeon RX6600, hooked into an ITX motherboard with some low-profile RAM sticks. Those components were paired with a thin keyboard, a touchpad, and a portable gaming monitor. Getting all that into a thin laptop case, even a custom one, was no mean feat. Ports had to be cut down to size, weird ribbon cables had to be employed, and heatsinks and coolers had to be rearranged. To say nothing of all the work to 3D print a case that was strong and actually worked!

The full journey is quite the ride. If you want to go right back to the start, you can find part one here.

We’ve seen some builds along these lines before, but seldom few that get anywhere near this level of fit and finish. Oftentimes, it’s that kind of physical polish that is most difficult to achieve. All we can say is “Bravo!” Oh, and… video after the break.

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Deep Dive Into A Prison Laptop

February 26, 2024 by Maya Posch 30 Comments

The phenomenon of prison electronics is by now relatively well-documented, with striking transparent radios, televisions, and kin easy to recognize. Yet what about prison laptops? As it turns out, these are a thing as well, and [Zephray Wenting] got one from eBay to investigate, as documented over at Twitter (ThreadReader single page). Much like their audiovisual brethren, these laptops lack basic features in the name of prison security, which in the case of this laptop means for example no USB ports. Even the spacebar stabilizer rod is missing. Weaponized keyboards are apparently a thing in corrections facilities.

The Justice Tech Solutions Securebook 5. (Credit: Zephray Wenting)

Called the Justice Tech Solutions Securebook 5, it has been superseded by the Securebook 6. Inside this earlier unit, you’ll find an Intel N3450 with 4 GB LPDDR3, with SATA for storage and a special dock connector. Some laptops come with WiFi hardware installed, others are unpopulated. It appears that these Securebooks by default have a BIOS password that cannot be erased, even by removing it from the NVRAM (‘CMOS’), as it’ll return on the next boot due to an automatic BIOS reset. This was temporarily bypassed through a hacky external SPI Flash adapter, but the reward for all this trouble was a BIOS setup screen with just the ‘Security’ tab.

It’s now been sleuthed out that the default password is N%(dU32p as reported by Hackaday’s own [Adam Fabio] on Twitter. It turns out the password was available on a (now private) YouTube video. [Techknight] on Twitter has delved into EFI BIOS hacking. He has an alternate BIOS image that does provide access to the full BIOS setup utility. With BIOS access not being necessary to boot the system, the question that [Zephray] went ahead with was how to boot it into an OS since the original HDD or SSD had been removed prior to being sold. The bad news here is that it turned out that the system has a HDD whitelist (which [Sark] found a way to bypass). The good news is that someone has probed the system before, with the storage device being reported as ‘China SATA3 240GB SSD’.

Rather than mess with this, it was attempted to boot from USB, by tapping into the USB lines for the touchpad, which turned out to allow booting into a live image of Ubuntu without fuss. As an ongoing project, it’ll be interesting to see what more functionality can be wrung out of this piece of prison kit, all hopefully from the right side of the prison bars.

Thanks to [livelaughliang] for the tip.

Laptop Memory Upgradable Again

January 14, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 38 Comments

For some computing components, the bottleneck to improved speed and performance hasn’t been power consumption or clock speed but physical space. But a new memory standard may provide all of the power and space-saving benefits of soldered memory modules without losing any upgradability.

The standard is called compression attached memory modules (CAMM) and provides a way for small form factor computers to have upgradable memory without needing dual in-line memory module (DIMM) slots. Unlike DIMM, though, CAMM modules allow for modern high-speed low-power memory to be used and can take advantage of dual-channel properties even if only one memory module is installed. CAMM modules are held in place with small screws, similar to modern M.2 drives, and don’t have the massive footprint of a DIMM slot. This allows laptop manufacturers to save nearly as much space as having soldered memory.

While this won’t solve the problem of computer manufacturers offering only soldered memory as a cash-grab, hopefully, some take the new standard under their wing for those of us who value the upgradability of our hardware. There are of course some problems with newer standards, but right now it seems like the only other viable option is soldered modules or slower, heavier computers. Some may argue that these soldered-on modules can be upgraded in theory, but not without considerable effort.

Recreating The IBM Thinkpad Case

November 22, 2023 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Once upon a time, laptops and other computer hardware often came with a fancy leather case for protection. That’s not really the case anymore, but it was in the golden era of the IBM ThinkPad. [polymatt] found a rare example, but wanted another one, so he decided to try and replicate it from scratch.

Leathercraft was a new discipline for [polymatt], and so the whole build was a learning experience. He started out by measuring the existing design and creating a diagram to guide his own work. He then traced the design on to a large piece of quality leather, carefully rounding the edges and adding a plastic stiffening plates to support the laptop where needed. Additional layers of leather were added to seal these in, and the leather was formed over guides to take the right shape. A slight misstep resulted in the case being too long, but a cut-and-shut job rectified the problem.

The finished result is a clean, impressive thing. Throughout the build, [polymatt] showed a certain mastery of the leatherworking tools that belied his lack of experience, too. The project should serve as a great inspiration to any other aspiring crafters who have contemplated creating their own custom leather goods for protecting their electronics. Video after the break.

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An ESP32 Dev Board As A Framework Laptop Module

July 1, 2023 by Jenny List 17 Comments

The Framework laptop will no doubt already have caught the eye of more than one Hackaday reader, as a machine designed for upgrade and expansion by its users. One of its key features is a system of expansion modules. The modules are USB-C devices in a form factor that slides into the expansion bays on the Framework Laptop. Framework encourages the development of new modules, which is something [Spacehuhn] has taken on with an ESP32-S3 development board.

The board itself is what you’d expect, the ESP is joined by a multicolor LED and one of those Stemma/Quiik connectors for expansion. The case is handily provided by Framework themselves, and all the files for the ESP32 module can be found in a GitHub repository. We’re guessing it will find application in experimenting with WiFi networks rather than as a standalone microcontroller. Either way, it shows the route for any Framework owners into making their own add-ons. Take a look, we’ve placed the video below the break.

As you might expect we’ve given a lot of coverage to the Framework laptop since its launch, in particular, our colleague [Arya Voronova] is a fan and has shown us many alternative uses for the parts.

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An Almost Invisible Desktop

June 3, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 28 Comments

When you’re putting together a computer workstation, what would you say is the cleanest setup? Wireless mouse and keyboard? Super-discrete cable management? How about no visible keeb, no visible mouse, and no obvious display?

That’s what [Basically Homeless] was going for. Utilizing a Flexispot E7 electronically raisable standing desk, an ASUS laptop, and some other off-the-shelf parts, this project is taking the idea of decluttering to the extreme, with no visible peripherals and no visible wires.

There was clearly a lot of learning and much painful experimentation involved, and the guy kind of glazed over how a keyboard was embedded in the desk surface. By forming a thin layer of resin in-plane with the desk surface, and mounting the keyboard just below, followed by lots of careful fettling of the openings meant the keys could be depressed. By not standing proud of the surface, the keys were practically invisible when painted. After all, you need that tactile feedback, and a projection keeb just isn’t right.

ChatGPT-inspired machine learning mouse emulator

Moving on, never mind an ultralight gaming mouse, how about a zero-gram mouse? Well, this is a bit of a cheat, as they mounted a depth-sensing camera inside a light fitting above the desk, and built a ChatGPT-designed machine-learning model to act as a hand-tracking HID device. Nice idea, but we don’t see the code.

The laptop chassis had its display removed and was embedded into the bottom of the desk, along with the supporting power supplies, a couple of fans, and a projector. To create a ‘floating’ display, a piece of transparent plastic was treated to a coating of Lux labs “ClearBright” transparent display film, which allows the image from the projector to be scattered and observed with sufficient clarity to be usable as a PC display. We have to admit, it looks a bit gimmicky, but playing Minecraft on this setup looks a whole lotta fun.

Many of the floating displays we’ve covered tend to be for clocks (after all timepieces are important) like this sweet HUD hack.

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