Librem Mini Teardown

Librem Mini on sale was about £360
The HDPlex case with NUC heatsink and PSU was - £230
The waterjet parts were - £220! High price was due to the little standoffs I wanted, without these it would have been about £70.
Various adapters and extensions < £50.

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that’s a few Eddies you’ve invested there … well worth it i imagine :nerd_face:

thank you for the input !

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@pureismfan I thought it would be more appropriate to answer this question here, rather than clog up your thread.

Can you confirm they are for the latest Librem Mini (version 2)? That’s the one I have. If that’s the case, can you put them somewhere to download, e.g. send.tresorit.com ? You could post the link here or message it to me if you prefer.
Will these parts “just work”? So all I need are Librem Mini v2, your 3d printed parts, HDPlex H1 V3, and I’m good to go? (As you can hear, I’m a complete newbie here)

I was a Librem Mini newbie too 6 months ago.

The v1 and v2 are almost identical, the only difference is the CPU, so the adaptors should work with both boards.

This build is not simple, but it’s not terribly difficult, especially since I did the groundwork already. I’m sure everything I did voids the warranty, so you’ve been warned :slight_smile:

In addition to the 3D printed adaptors you’ll also need some 15mm motherboard/pcb standoffs I purchased mine from ebay

You’ll also need a tool to tap the screw holes (or you can just try screwing directly into the holes and hope that the screws cut the threads as they go).

When you get the parts printed try to get a high temperature plastic, preferably at least 80C. I don’t expect the CPU to ever get that hot but you don’t want the mounts to melt if something goes wrong. If you can get them in metal (especially the CPU adaptor) that’s even better.

Because of the way the ports are laid out on the board some of them will be inside the case, if you want access to these from the outside you’ll need to use extension cables and adaptors as I did in mine (see the build video for details).

Now for the tricky part: Once the board it mounted the power switch will be inside the case. What you need to do before you start the build is de-solder the power switch from the motherboard and solder on a couple of wires with 2 standard header pins, I used a bit of stripboard to make it more secure. You can do the same for the power LED as well if you like, then you can just attach the power switch cable that comes with the HDPlex case. The polarity of the switch doesn’t matter but the polarity of the LED does.

You’ll need to manually bend some of the heat pipes supplied with the HDPlex NUC adaptor kit (this probably voids another warranty), the NUC kit is sold separately to the HDPlex case. The bends are only small, I used a pipe bender but as long as you’re gentle I think you could do it with your hands, just don’t over do it or the pipes will get crushed at the bends.

You don’t need to buy the additional HDPlex power supply as I did, you can just use the one that comes with the Mini.

I’ll get my brother to send me the 3D printer files and I’ll upload them.

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almost yes. the LMv2 uses more power though. this results in a bigger power-supply-unit (PSU) brick (a few cm longer than that of the LMv1) and a few amps more …

LMv1 > 19v up to 2.1 Amps ~40 watts drawn from the wall
LMv2 > 19v up to 3.42 Amps ~65 watts

the iGPU is listed with a slightly different name under PureOS-10-Byzantium for the LMv2 (they are slightly different but still 620 )

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both ship with 40W PSUs that are identical in spec, if not physical size. The system power limits (PL1/2) are likewise programmed the same in firmware for both versions

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Thanks for all the details! :slight_smile: The community looks forward to your files :slight_smile:

It’s not really a “mini” at this point :slight_smile: However still a great, fairly small desktop PC :smiley:

Just a quick question I thought of.

Why did you go through all this trouble? Would it not have been easier (and maybe cheaper) to just buy an existing hdplex-compatible motherboard and Intel CPU of your choice, and disable the ME + install coreboot yourself?

I have no idea if that would be easier or not, so I’d love to hear your ideas.

Coreboot is only available for a relatively small number of motherboards and most of them are low spec (by today’s standards). The mini is (as far as I know) the only desktop-ish corebootable system that supports a modern CPU, 64GB DDR4 and USB3. If there are others do let me know! I also have a couple of Corebooted AMD systems and a Librebooted Thinkpad but they are 10+ years old.

I’ll upload the files later today.

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Adding to @morgan, here is a list of currently supported motherboards for coreboot, URL below:

https://coreboot.org/status/board-status.html

Anyone adventurous enough to consider installing coreboot on a different motherboard, I ask kindly to update your test results to the list, as many of them are still marked as untested.

Here are the STL files for 3D printing the motherboard adaptor, CPU mount, and IO shield. http://www.filedropper.com/libremini-stls

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If anyone is interested in buying a fanless Librem Mini system send me a PM :wink:

@morgan you said you have 200W PSU in your setup, I wonder how it could benefit from additional power then? Or that power limits @MrChromebox mentioned are actually more than 40W?

See this thread - CPU usage when compiling on the Librem Mini

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@morgan Would you reupload the STL files? The previous link seems expired…

Yes, I’ll try and find somewhere more permanent

That would be great, thanks :smile:

I’ve uploaded them to Thingiverse

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4902139

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Ah, crafting stuff. Love it! :smile:

@morgan Thanks much. Truly amazing work.

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