[Arm-netbook] modifying a 7 inch notebook cabinet to accept a pc card

[Christopher Havel]

Regarding the keyboard... here's the secret. Get hook probes for your
multimeter. The little springloaded ones. (Google Image search if you don't
know.) That reduces it to a non-invasive half-hour process (or
thereabouts)... that's what it took me with an Adesso ACK-595 USB compact
keyboard.

Hook to one row, one column, with your multimeter set to continuity. (This
may or may not be a challenge to identify.) Press a key. If you get a
match, move to the next column and the next key. Proceed systematically.

As for the AnyTop. Body is a standard three-ring binder with the ring
module removed (that's what the drill is needed for -- #(^&$#@!! rivets).
Display is a Chinese clone of the WaveShare 7" 1024x600 "Type C" HDMI touch
display, ignoring the touch input. Keyboard and mouse are cheap compact
wired USB models. There is a four-port bus-powered USB hub (system unit has
only two ports... ew) that's an IOGEAR model I'm personally familiar with,
it's a gem from them. (I'd prefer a self-powered hub, but those get too
expensive too fast.) System unit is a WinTel CX-W8 or similar... Atom
Z3735F CPU, 2gb RAM, 32gb eMMC SSD... you know, the usual for set-top style
and "cloud stick" style cheap-piece-of-crap Chinese computers on eBay.
Power supply is a 5v 6a brick. No battery. There is a piece of cut-out
cardboard to prop the lid portion of the binder up.

Everything goes together with 3M double stick foam tape (or a compatible
third-party substitute) except the power supply leads -- which go together
with wire nuts. The knife is needed to cut/strip wires and to make a hole
for the HDMI and power cables to go through to the system unit. The
screwdriver is needed either (a) if the binder's ring thing for once does
not use rivets, or (b) if the LCD is ordered with a case (which is an
option, not a necessity).

Once the parts are all present and accounted for, it should go together in
far less than an afternoon. Figure about a couple hours for a complete
novice who is all thumbs. I'm debating including a MicroSD card with each
set of instructions (this is not, and will not be, a kit) that contains a
customized, installable Linux Mint image that will run on these
computers... standard Mint generally does not have working WiFi, Bluetooth,
or audio. Of course, maintaining my own semi-fork of Mint is not something
I find a particularly scintillating prospect, so that may or may not
actually happen, even though the other choice is sticking people with
Win10, or letting them do the work of installing their own Linux and
hunting up drivers and coaxing the system into working properly.

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 8:34 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net
> wrote:

> ---
> crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
>
>
> On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 10:40 PM, Christopher Havel
> <laserhawk64 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Keyboard is easy if you know a little electronics. A laptop keyboard is a
> > matrix keypad. Rows and columns. One key connects one row to one column.
>
>  i found quite a lot of tutorials online about this.  and still had to
> destroy a
>  perfectly good keyboard in order to reverse-engineer the row/column
> matrix.
>
> > I am designing, for a competition on Hackaday, a "made from common
> modules"
> > "laptop" that I'm calling the AnyTop. The goal is that anyone can build
> it
> > if they can use a screwdriver, knife, and some sort of drill. (The drill
> is
> > only needed in one place.) It won't have a battery... but it will be a
> > laptop form factor and it will work. Luke, would some discussion of this
> be
> > on-topic?
>
>  sounds great.  i'd particularly be interested to hear how much time and
>  effort it takes any one person to follow the resultant instructions, and
>  how much they have to spend to do it.
>
> l.
>
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