It would be pretty cool to be able to borrow or swap the modem from a Librem 5. It wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t have it though.
I agree it does makes a lot of sense but I hope they will instead improve things that can be improved from what they learn from the phone. There may possibly still be some cost benefits if they use a similar design.
That’s what I was thinking but I wasn’t sure.
I think it could and likely would be optional because not everyone will want it. And I think sharing the same modems with the phone will take a lot of the hassle out of it.
I seriously hope they don’t make it too much thicker than 15mm. Assuming they will have a keyboard attachment like they advertised originally, that would make it a pretty chunky package.
The i.MX 8M Quad wasn’t either was it? So I guess the phone will give some indication of power usage in the i.MX 8 range. And it looks like we’ll find out soon since the shipping was just announced!
That would be kind of cool but if you are going to do that then you really want the modem to be able to be slid in and plugged in, and the reverse, and I think there may not be enough space in the L5 to do that. I’m thinking that it could work a bit like PCMCIA cards in ancient laptops.
That’s why I am suggesting that the L5 be able to be tethered - but this would mean that you have to take both devices with you.
The tablet itself could offer three options:
comes with empty M.2 slot so that you can upgrade to the next option later on if you ever want to
comes with populated M.2 slot where you order the modem at the time of ordering the tablet
comes with no M.2 slot (would never have built-in mobile broadband - would have to use tethering) but the space that is freed up is used productively for a better spec on some other aspect
At this time the third option is highly speculative since we are just throwing around ideas.
The intention was the reverse … the tablet could be thinner than the phone because there is more real estate to play with. That’s what @Caliga said and I agreed with that as a possibility.
It would be nice if they could be swapped as easy as PCMCIA cards though I don’t think it will be too much more difficult (I hope ). It’s always going to be a bit fiddly with an exposed circuit board. It would be a nice option to have even if it isn’t really user friendly.
Ok. Sorry about that. I didn’t understand that from what you had written.
It is not very well known why Bunnie Huang really started the Novena Laptop project. He does not talk about it publicly. Given that he does a lot of reverse engineering, of products that are profitable and developed by cartels allow me to leave it to your imagination as to what happened.
The EOMA68 Laptop that I designed uses an STM32F072 to perform keyboard matrix scanning. It is not difficult.
The STM32F is very deliberately connected to the EOMA68 GPIO, giving Cards FULL hard reset and power and reflash control over the STM32F.
At boot time it becomes possible to erase and reflash the firmware, making the probability of running compromised keyboard firmware precisely zero.
The same EC also runs a capacitive touchpad with an LCD, that acts as a programmable mouse trackpad.
It looks like purism already is selling keyboard, mouse, plus 24 and 30 inch monitors that hooks up with L5 phone. $700-1000 extra for monitors, keyboard, and mouse? Maybe headphone included as shown in picture. No spec details or why they cost way too much.
A fair list. Everyone’s priorities will be at least a little bit different.
I don’t know whether Purism will specifically consider the ideas that have been put up here but if they do, some clarification would be needed as to what is meant by things like “router” and “Pi” and “NAS”.
For example, a router could be a pure router, say, routing from one ethernet to another. Or it could have some specific non-ethernet WAN side technologies. And it could be dual (or triple) WAN. And it could optionally have a built-in Wireless Access Point. And each of the network equipment roles has a mass of optional functionality. Some people want basic. Some people want advanced.
I think NAS is already discussed in an earlier post i.e. what people want from a NAS. How many disks? JBOD? RAID? Hot swap? Backup? What file sharing protocols?
Fair enough. I do wonder how the manufacturer would communicate the keystrokes back to itself. Secret low power, low speed 3G modem? LoRa? If a manufacturer uses a mechanism that is too complicated on the host side then probably it will only work on Windows, which suits me fine.
String length of course but, say, 30W to 60W, depending on number of disks installed and type of disk and level of activity (i.e. whether anything can go to sleep).
my guess it needs to run 24/7 right ? then it’s 24x60=1200(aprox) watts per day added to everything else … it’s not nothing but not very much either … depends on the demand i guess …
). It’s always going to be a bit fiddly with an exposed circuit board. It would be a nice option to have even if it isn’t really user friendly.
