Olimex has been working on an open source hardware Olimex A64 laptop for a little over a year, and the company has now complete thed hardware design of their TERES I laptop, and are working on finalizing the software design before accepting orders for 225 Euros for TERES-A64-BLACK and TERES-A64-WHITE models.
As explained in the instructions manual, Olimex laptop will not be sold assembled, but as a kit to let the users assemble the following parts themselves:
- TERES-006-Keyboard QWERTY keyboard
- TERES-023-Touch touchpad with TERES-022-Touch-Cover and TERES-010-Touch-Btns
- TERES-014-Screw-Set with 42 pieces of different kind of screws.
- TERES-PCB3-Touch PCB
- TERES-PCB2-IO PCB with headphone jack, micro SD slot, and a USB port
- TERES-PCB4-Btn PCB for the power button together with TERES-009-Pwr-Btn plastic and TERES-013-LED-pipe
- TERES-PCB1-A64 motherboard based on Allwinner A64 processor.
- TERES-PCB5-KEYBOARD keyboard control board
- Display parts: TERES-008-LCD-Back, TERES-016-Hinge-Set, TERES-007-LCD-Frame, and TERES-015-LCD 11.6″ LCD panel
- TERES-019-Camera & TERES-020-Camera-Lens for the webcam
- Speakers, battery,WiFi antenna, and a few flat cables to connect all the boards together
That’s quite a lot of parts, but the instructions are clear enough, and you and/or your kid) will have bragging rights to say “I’ve made my own laptop!” wchich should have the following specifications:
- SoC – Allwinner A64 quad core ARM Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.2 GHz with Mali-400MP2 GPU
- System Memory – 1GB DDR3L
- Storage – 4GB eMMC Flash, micro SD slot
- Display – 11.6″ 1366×768 pixels display
- Video Output – 1x mini HDMI 1.4 port
- Audio – Via mini HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack, 2x speakers, microphone
- Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n WiFi up to 150Mbps, Bluetooth 4.0 LE
- USB – 2x USB port ports
- Front camera
- QWERTY keyboard + touchpad with 2 buttons
- Battery – 7,000mAh capacity
- Weight – 980 grams
You’re not quite done yet, as you still have to flash the firmware/operating system – either Android or Linux – on a micro SD, in order to boot the laptop. Software and hardware documentation is available in github. The software currently includes ARM trusted firmware, u-boot, the Linux kernel and device tree files with more common soon. The hardware has been designed with KiCAD open source EDA software, and if you want to change or improve one of the boards in the design, you can do so, as the source schematics and PCB layout are there for everyone to study and/or modify. If you don’t want to modify anything, but would like to have access to spare parts, you will be able to buy them instead.
If you go FOSDEM 2017, you’ll have opportunity to check out the laptop yourself since Olimex will be there.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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