Building a Laptop with a Board like this?

[Steffen Huber]

Peter Naulls wrote:
[snip] The problem with producing a RISC OS laptop will always be availability of cases and financial justifiability.

Availability of cases should be less of a problem now. It just
came to my attention that Elitegroup now start selling a kind
of "barebone" laptops which come with display, possibly floppy/cd
drives and a mainboard, but without processor, an XP licence,
RAM and a HD.

A 15" screen model (1024x768 only unfortunately) is sold for 699 EUR
over here, including a DVD/CDRW combo drive.

So the only open questions are: how long would it take to design a
board fitting into such a case, and how could we ensure that
the case is available long enough?

Would it be possible to do a two-part design - a "mainboard" and
a "connector module" with all the ports, where only the connector
module would need to be redesigned when the case changes?

Steffen

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steffen.huber@gmx.de steffen@huber-net.de
GCC for RISC OS - http://www.arcsite.de/hp/gcc/
Private homepage - http://www.huber-net.de/

[Theo Markettos]

Steffen Huber <spam@huber-net.de> wrote: So the only open questions are: how long would it take to design a board fitting into such a case, and how could we ensure that the case is available long enough? Would it be possible to do a two-part design - a "mainboard" and a "connector module" with all the ports, where only the connector module would need to be redesigned when the case changes?

Possibly. It depends what the case is like - in particular if there's
enough space for two boards. I fear there might be problems with mounting
holes moving - but one of the SA-on-a-SIMM projects (or similar) might be
used to make a small CPU/IO board with a big cheap connector board. That
way you could also sell the processor card to other people for embedded
projects.

Theo

--
Theo Markettos theo@markettos.org.uk
Larisa, Greece theom@chiark.greenend.org.uk
http://www.markettos.org.uk/