Novena Open Laptop Prototype

It has been over a year that hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has been collaborating with Sean Cross in order to work on an open laptop. In a nutshell, this open laptop would allow you to start the machine and run majority of the common applications out there in the market without having to make use of any proprietary, closed-source binaries as well as other kinds software. Not only that, to live up to its namesake, the hardware design itself would also be open and available.

Also known as the Novena laptop, both Huang and Cross have ended up creating a number of fully functional prototypes. Bear in mind that these Novena prototypes will not be a powerful laptop that allows you to play the latest and greatest game on the stop, but rather, they are a proof of concept that shows the world that such an idea can be done. The thing is, these will not come cheap, as the Novena project itself will target those who are drawn to open platforms which would then enable users to modify, share, and generally muck around the hardware and software designs according to their preference.

The prototype shown above happens to come with a 13” display at 2560 x 1700 pixel resolution, running on a Freescale i.MX6 processor, has a SATA solid state drive, a couple of Ethernet ports, USB and other connectors.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: DYI