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 …
Getting the numbers and the units correct … 60W x 24 hr = 1440Whr per day = 1.44 kWh per day which at current electricity prices is not much per day. Bear in mind that 60W is a fairly loaded NAS i.e. a fair few disks, not just one or two - and that assumes no sleeping.
if we factor in 1mil people then it adds up in a solar-energy deficient country it might be quite substantial … i think it helps if we remember that everything adds up even if just for a few people it doesn’t mean much (we are a few billion people connected already - globally)
Fair enough. My comment was about affordability, not sustainability. I am not in a position to know whether you supply your own electricity or whether your electricity (regardless of supplier) is renewable.
Again though 60W is towards the top end. A single low-power consumption headless computer with a single SSD could be consuming just a handful of Watts when not doing much.
Also note that in lots of places, electricity for appliances is essentially free for at least 3 months a year, since if you’re not using enough of it, you end up just running a bunch through a set of copper coils with a fan. Even if you have gas heat, the marginal impact is the difference in cost and efficiency between your gas heat and your electric appliance.
