This Kid Made his Own Laptop and it’s AMAZING!

Summary

The video by Linus Tech Tips showcases the inspiring story of a high school student, Byron, who engineered his own ARM-powered laptop. With features like a 4K AMOLED screen, Cherry MX mechanical keyboard, and a custom-machined aluminum chassis, Byron's creation stands out as a powerful piece of tech. His modular laptop emphasizes open-source innovation and challenges the traditional manufacturing norms dominated by big companies. Despite not being a commercial product, Byron's laptop demonstrates groundbreaking engineering skills and has garnered remarkable attention, including numerous job offers in the industry.

Highlights

• Byron's ARM-powered laptop boasts a stunning 4K AMOLED display and a luxurious Cherry MX mechanical keyboard. 🔥
• The laptop's chassis is expertly crafted from machined aluminum, offering both durability and sleek aesthetics. 🔩
• Byron's open-source approach enables learnings and adaptations from his project, inspiring other tech enthusiasts. 🌟
• Linus humorously acknowledges the impressive engineering, celebrating Byron's ambition and execution. 🎉
• Despite minor flaws, the laptop proves a hit, showing how passion can outperform big industry efforts. 😊

Key Takeaways

• Byron, a high schooler, created an ARM-powered modular laptop with open-source components, showcasing remarkable tech skills. 🔧
• The custom laptop features a 4K AMOLED screen, Cherry MX keyboard, and a machined aluminum chassis, emphasizing quality and innovation. 💻
• Byron's project reveals the potential and ingenuity of small creators, challenging larger corporations in the tech industry. 🚀
• Despite being in school, Byron's work has opened doors with multiple job offers, showcasing the value of passion-driven projects. 📬
• Linus recognizes Byron's innovation, celebrating his approach to open-source development and sharing knowledge with the world. 🌍

Overview

In a world dominated by corporate tech giants, Byron, a high school student, emerges as a beacon of innovation by crafting his own laptop from scratch. The ARM-powered machine isn't just functional; it's an impressive blend of performance and design. Featuring a 4K AMOLED screen and a Cherry MX mechanical keyboard, Byron's creation exudes quality at every corner, challenging the notion that sophisticated tech is exclusive to large companies.

As the video unfolds, the viewer is taken on an incredible journey through Byron's brainchild. From its CNC-machined aluminum chassis to the open-source blueprint, every facet of the laptop is by Byron. His design reflects not just a keen sense of style but a clear understanding of engineering principles. Linus Tech Tips dives into the technicalities with humor and excitement, underscoring Byron's ingenuity and dedication.

Byron's project isn't just a technological feat; it's a narrative of exploration and discovery. Despite the challenges faced in bringing his laptop to life, Byron's efforts haven't gone unnoticed. With multiple job offers coming his way, his story illustrates how passion and skill can break barriers, inspire innovation, and open doors far beyond the confines of his high school lab.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Modular Laptop Concept The chapter discusses the recurring attempts by various brands to create modular or upgradeable laptops. The narrator, an enthusiast for PC building and the right to repair, expresses persistent support for these initiatives, going so far as to invest in Framework, a company embodying this concept. Despite the enthusiasm, modular laptops often remain conceptual dreams, as many efforts are discontinued before reaching the market. This raises the question of why individual efforts seem more successful than those of larger companies.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Byron's Custom Laptop The chapter describes an impressive feat by Byron, a high school student, who designed and built his own ARM-powered laptop in just six months. The laptop is described as a powerful machine featuring a 4K AMOLED screen, a Cherry MX mechanical keyboard, and a custom machined aluminum chassis. Byron also created a highly polished video to showcase his process, prompting the narrator to express interest in meeting him.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Meeting Byron and Product Showcase The chapter titled 'Meeting Byron and Product Showcase' involves the speaker discussing the importance of personal interaction, which is why Byron was brought in to evaluate a product called Anonyi. The conversation begins with a light-hearted question about dancing, segueing into the promotion of their sponsor, ODU, which offers over 50 applications aimed at improving business operations, covering diverse areas like accounting, marketing, and HR.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Product Features and Design Philosophy The chapter discusses a live event on ltstore.com, highlighting a promotion of free worldwide shipping on orders over $150. It encourages purchases of various products such as the commuter backpack and scribe driver. There is also a special offer on the magnetic cable management essentials bundle. Additionally, a humorous anecdote is mentioned about mistaking a machine for another due to quality issues.
• 05:00 - 08:00: Technical Aspects and DIY Challenges In this chapter titled 'Technical Aspects and DIY Challenges', the focus is on the challenges faced during do-it-yourself projects and the technical aspects involved. The conversation revolves around an impressive-looking project that encounters a hiccup when a component breaks unexpectedly. Despite this setback, the speaker maintains a positive attitude, emphasizing the importance of the overall project remaining intact. The chapter highlights the use of specific tools to address minor issues, underscoring the problem-solving aspect of DIY efforts.
• 08:00 - 10:00: Components and Cost Breakdown This chapter discusses the motivation and thought process behind designing a specific laptop, emphasizing its importance and impact on future content and memes. The conversation highlights the speaker's dedication to the project and includes a light-hearted exchange about preparing for video content.
• 10:00 - 12:00: Display and Trackpad Details The chapter 'Display and Trackpad Details' seems to delve into the specifics of a custom-made keyboard for a laptop. The speaker expresses a desire to cloister themselves from learning more than necessary, indicating a focus on essential knowledge. It is noted that the keyboard uses Cherry MX switches and has custom-made keycaps, showing an emphasis on personalization and quality. The detachable nature of the keyboard is highlighted, with the creator aiming to make it a centerpiece of the laptop. This appears to prioritize the tactile and aesthetic elements of the user interface, particularly when the performance of other components like the chip may be constrained.
• 12:00 - 15:00: Speaker Presentation In this chapter titled 'Speaker Presentation,' the speaker discusses innovative features of a new laptop design, emphasizing its capabilities beyond just a standard model. Primarily, they highlight the inclusion of a 4K AMOLED display and a unique wireless removable keyboard, which doubles as a Bluetooth keyboard and can be used independently with other devices. The keyboard includes Cherry MX mechanical switches, a feature the speaker was passionate about incorporating. Despite these highlights, the speaker notes an oversight—failing to adequately address the motivation behind these choices.
• 15:00 - 18:00: ARM-Based Chip Discussion The chapter discusses an individual's extensive experience with open source electrical engineering projects, focusing on key components of a laptop such as power systems, keyboards, compute, and displays. They previously worked for Keyron designing a new product and now aim to integrate these components into a cohesive, open source package. The process includes testing components like keyboards, which are yet to be powered on and tested, starting with connecting the keyboard to a laptop.
• 18:00 - 23:00: Future Projects and Open Source Contribution The chapter discusses the absence of a pairing button and off button on a keyboard that uses ZMK, allowing it to stay on constantly and run for almost a year on a single charge. The keyboard also features battery life reporting.
• 23:00 - 24:00: Firing Colton Skit and Conclusion The chapter discusses the impressively thin design of a keyboard, suggesting its potential as a viable product prototype. The speaker expresses enthusiasm for the product, noting its advanced design and personal preference, particularly highlighting that they are a 915 TKL user.

This Kid Made his Own Laptop and it’s AMAZING! Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Every so often, some brand or another takes a stab at a modular or upgradeable laptop. And as someone who does an awful lot of PC building and is very pright to repair, I am so here for it every single time. I even invested my own money in framework to show my support for the dream. But alas, a dream remains because almost all of these efforts end up discontinued before they even become a real product. Which raises the question, if all these big companies can't do it, how come this guy can? Byron here
• 00:30 - 01:00 customd designed, built, and open-sourced his own ARMPowered laptop in just 6 months. But it's a shockingly potent machine. I'm talking a 4K AMOLED screen, CherryMX mechanical keyboard, and a custom machined aluminum chassis. And the guy's still in high school. Then he casually throws together this highly polished video showing how he did it. I mean, have you seen my first videos? Obviously, I had to meet this guy. So, uh, hang on one second. Hey, Byron. Zoom
• 01:00 - 01:30 is just so impersonal. So, I flew Byron out here so I could check out the Anonyi. Yes, Anonyi. Yes, in person. And my first question for you is, do you dance? I do. Really? Do you know the uh here? Do you know the segue? Our sponsor ODU helps you dance away the work headache. Moonwalk through all those crazy taxes keeping your business moving to the beat. They have over 50 apps covering everything from accounting to marketing to HR and more. The ship storm sale
• 01:30 - 02:00 event is live now on ltstore.com. You'll get free shipping on any order over $150 worldwide. So, it's a great time to pick up a commuter backpack or a scribe driver, a screwdriver, or anything else you've had your eye on. And we're featuring our lowest price ever on our magnetic cable management essentials bundle. Go check it out at the link down below. Didn't notice how bad the quality was. It was funny you say that because as I was walking up to set earlier, I saw your machine. I thought it was mine.
• 02:00 - 02:30 I am impressed at how good it looks. Actually, this is incredible. Oh no, you broke it already. Wow, that was actually really quick even for me. Okay. What happened? It's all right. I don't really know. Wait, did you just throw it away? Yeah, that was a screw. It's okay. Screw, you know, bad quality. But the important thing is that it's still all together, right? Do you want to put the screw back? No, it's all right. Cuz I think I have the perfect tool for you. What is it?
• 02:30 - 03:00 What are you talking about? From ltstore.com. Yeah, let's go. My first and maybe most important question is why? When I set out to b make this laptop, I really wanted to focus on creating something. That's going to be the memes forever now, right? That's going to that's going to be in the drop reels going on in the future. You set me up. I did. You set me up. I did. Yeah. It looks like you didn't watch the video I made. I skipped through a little bit. Yeah, I can tell. Well, see, here's the thing. Whenever I know that we're going to be making a video about something, I go out of my
• 03:00 - 03:30 way to cloister myself. I don't want to learn any more about it than I have to. The keyboard. Yep. I know it's Cherry MX. That's right. Um I know that it was custom made including the key caps. That's right. You know that there are commercially available laptop keyboards, right? So what inspired you to take this detachable approach? So when I set out to make it, I really wanted to focus on creating something that the keyboard will be a centerpiece of the laptop. And when I can't focus on the performance of the chip itself, I'm limited to, you
• 03:30 - 04:00 know, a crappy rock chip RK3588. I wanted to make the laptop stand out in other aspects like the 4K AMOLED display and of course this wireless removable keyboard. The entire battery is enclosed in here and it is a fully wireless Bluetooth keyboard. So it just, you know, simply slots in to the laptop chassis magnetically like so. And you can use it on another laptop, you can use it on this laptop, whatever you want. Putting in Cherry MX mechanical switches was a challenge that I really wanted to do cuz I I love mechanical keyboards. You never actually answered the question of why. So, in the past, I
• 04:00 - 04:30 really worked on a lot of open source electrical engineering projects. And so, I've worked on various parts of what might be considered a laptop system like power systems, um, keyboard, compute, display driving, human input. I worked for Keyron in the past designing a new product. After making all those things, I really wanted to put everything together into this one cohesive package and make it open source for everyone to see. I'm going to try to use the keyboard first cuz we haven't even powered this on yet. I want to have that experience a little bit later. I want to connect the keyboard to my laptop. All right, great. So, I would assume there's
• 04:30 - 05:00 a pairing button. So, no, there isn't. There is not. There's also no off button on this keyboard. It's always on. Wow. Yeah. Uh, good. Yeah, of course. Convenient. It is. It's always on. And the reason it can do that is cuz it's on ZMK, so it runs almost a year on a single charge. No way. Yeah, almost a year. I haven't charged it really since I I built it. 94%. It even has battery life reporting. Yep. You got to be kidding me. Yeah, that is very cool. Also, I cheated a little bit while you were distracted. I pressed down on one
• 05:00 - 05:30 of the keys. That is a shocking amount of travel. That's right. Considering how thin this thing is. Yep. Yep. Like it's it's like it goes all the way down to the PCB. Every single slice of this keyboard has been designed to be as thin as possible. If someone brought this to me as a V1 prototype of a product, I'd be like, "Fuck, send it." Yeah. Cuz this is awesome. I don't know if you know this, but I'm actually a 915 TKL user. And what I love about it is that it's a
• 05:30 - 06:00 desktop keyboard, but it's it's super low profile, and I love the I love the feel of the key switches. I would say there's a little work to do on the profile of this before it was a retail product, but in terms of the feel, like what you've accomplished here is outstanding. Yes, he knows it. Thank you so much. Thank you. He knows it. Thank you. It has a shockingly typewriteresque sound. Yeah, I actually kind of love it. Here, hold on. You got to kind of here. You got to kind of hear it up
• 06:00 - 06:30 close. Like it almost it has a bit of a clang, which in the mechanical keyboard space is not quote unquote desirable, but it does it in kind of a cool way. I guess my next question is how confident were you going into this that you would be able to build something resembling like I said I mistook it for my own machine right a real laptop. I'm calling mine a fake. No. Uh I'm calling it not commercial. Ah yeah. Yeah. I set myself really really
• 06:30 - 07:00 high bars. Like I looked at a Framework 13 and I looked at a 14-inch MacBook Pro. I tried to make as many comparisons as I could to them and accomplish as, you know, as close as I possibly could. The confidence pretty much zero. Why don't we talk about the thing that really sets this machine apart from other DIY laptops, and that is the machined body. There's less flex than yours. Hold on. Let's validate this. Okay. Okay. That's a lot of flex.
• 07:00 - 07:30 Pretty good. I think that is I've never done that to it. I'm just too scared. Yeah. Well, it didn't break. So, that's a Yeah. Yeah. Let's go. So, in choosing the chassis design and the material and the annotization, I made a bunch of these cubes. This is half of the cubes I evaluated. And so, in the end, I settled on this one. The reason I know it's this one is cuz I actually like milled into it. So, I knew how malleable the metal was if I had to modify it later on. Oh, got it. So you were looking both at the finish and at the actual material
• 07:30 - 08:00 because we say, "Oh, it's made of aluminum, but almost nothing is made of pure aluminum. It's made out of some aluminum alloy and they have very different properties potentially. The unibody design is quite special than a traditional laptop. The palm rest or the mid plate as I call it actually screws in from the top and the the reason stems from the actual keyboard being a removable detachable piece. So, I wanted it to just slide right in. And the most optimal position to do way to do that
• 08:00 - 08:30 would be by having the bottom completely screwless. There's nothing behind it. And you just machine out basically this bottom shell and then the top shell. And then you put framework hinges this closure, right? Yeah. Yep. All right. So, you put these hinges in and you just, you know, it'll come together just like that. Obviously, it's a it's a function first design, but I want to have a quick philosophical conversation with you. Personally, I don't like seeing the function of a product harmed by this. I feel irrational desire to
• 08:30 - 09:00 hide screws. Y do you think it's okay to just have some screws visible on something? Of course. I mean, why not? If you get to where you need to go, screws are the way. I also have duct tape there, you know. Okay. There's only two types of screws. Uh there's only Torx and Phillips on there. Nice and repairable. And now we're pulling up the CAD. So, this is the bottom chassis itself. And no wonder it's so rigid. Yeah, it is fully CNCed and and heavy. What? It's a little heavy. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Hefty. Yeah, hefty. Yeah, I missed
• 09:00 - 09:30 the F. He t There's a lot of different parts that come fitting that comes to fit into the actual chassis, including the two framework 13 hinges. Yeah. And then so the powertrain board mounts right over here. Yeah. And then the actual main compute board, I call it the main board or the motherboard goes right here. Do you call it that? Did you come up with that term? No. Main board. I didn't, but I call it that. Um, and so, and then here we have four individual battery cells. And I wanted to make
• 09:30 - 10:00 these battery cells separate. One is for safety. I didn't want to blow up like the entire laptop when I was sleeping, but it also allows me to build a custom battery pack so I can specify to however much I want. This can actually discharge 150 watts at any given moment, but obviously it won't ever do that. But, you know, just for a rock chip, not on a rock chip. Here on the left side, we have um two USB C 3.1 Gen 2 ports. I don't have the firmware to support a external display on them just yet, but you know, maybe in the future. In the many revisions I made with the laptop, I
• 10:00 - 10:30 actually have three separate designs for the main board. I switched from an HDMI, which didn't really work, and the signal integrity was a little off. I switched to a USB 2.0 port at the very end. And also just cuz I was mad that you know how how how can a MacBook not fit a USB 2.0, you know, a USBA port in there. And this is no thinner. This is This is no thicker. Since we're at it, why don't we look at the rest of the IO? You've got a micro SD reader. Nice to see. Headphone jack. Doesn't work. Oh, yeah. Bad engineering. Oh, yeah. It just didn't work. I don't know why. And then this is a power only input, right? So, you
• 10:30 - 11:00 cannot charge the battery from this side, I would assume. Fortunately, no. The reason you can't charge from these USBC ports is because I wanted to separate the compute and the power system so they individually function first to save the timeline. This looks great, by the way. This is very classy. Yeah, I really like that. So, did you just take it to a third party shop to have it machined out? I did. I got it CNC by JLC. It didn't cost that much. It only costed around what $300 to $500 really for the entire chassis, every metal piece combined. And that included the cost of the metal? Yes, it does. And
• 11:00 - 11:30 the anodization. So, it came to me fully blacked out already. Oh, dude. I would have guessed over a,000 for sure. You want to take a guess at how much this laptop costed? R&D everything added up together. How are you calculating the R&D? What are you billing out at? Every everything that I bought, everything that I bought to make this laptop. So, just parts. Just parts. Every failed revision, every, you know, misinput, everything that I had to buy cuz I burned it. All of that added up. So, really, I should be looking more at you than at that because it's like, how much would he burn? How much would he
• 11:30 - 12:00 destroy? a lot. I'm going to say what? 5K. You're spot on. It's around 4.8. 5K. Yeah. Yeah. I still got Oh my god. Yeah. Well, look, we've developed a number of products ourselves. So, I have some idea of what the failure rates are like when you're trying to figure stuff out. This is it. Big moment. I get to turn it on now. I have expected it to make like a MacBook noise or something. I I don't know if you're an Apple fan. Turns on a
• 12:00 - 12:30 bit. There it goes. Oh, dude. You got like a you got like a splash screen and everything. That's cool. Thank you. I still remember when I set up my old machine when I was about your age to have a uh to have a Jolly Rodger for the Windows XP loading screen and it said Windows XP Pirate Edition. I might not be alive for that. Okay, let's get through this video and then I retire. Is reception an issue? Where did you put
• 12:30 - 13:00 your antennas? Yeah. So the antennas are actually underneath the space between the battery and the palm rest. So there's metal in front of them. Yes. Ah but you know metal and air are just you know the difference of molecules right basically. I mean yeah. Are you sure you wouldn't have considered maybe you know running them up here like they do on other laptops? Yeah but I got lazy from my past having done 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz and RF engineering. It doesn't really matter if you're going through um metal
• 13:00 - 13:30 that much. All right, let's see this display. Okay, man. This display looks incredible. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about that. Where on earth do you go about getting a 4K AMOLED panel if you need one? I was just looking through scrolling and I found this panel, the ATNA 33TP11 from Samsung. That's the 4K AMOLED display panel you see here. It was on some old ASUS laptops from 3 4 years ago. And I really liked it cuz it looks so good and yeah, looks awesome. So, I bought some off of Tao or the
• 13:30 - 14:00 Chinese AliExpress basically. And the hard part was running it directly from the RK3588 over embedded display port, right? Cuz here's the thing. Embedded display port theoretically is a standard, but everyone both on the system side and the panel side around with it. So, how did you get it working? Yeah. One sec. He's gone. He left. I mean, I broke his laptop. I guess I kind of had it coming. When I first started the project, I chose this
• 14:00 - 14:30 RK3588 system on a module. Yeah. So, it slots into this development board just like that. You know, just pop it pops right in. Beautiful. This is that thing that we featured, the little NAS thing. It is. You were the one that inspired it. Oh. Oh, that's cool. Great. Nice little board. And, you know, you can make a laptop. Yeah, it's a really cool little board. We're probably going to have a float plane behind the scenes for this with some extras. So, uh check it out. lg.gg/flowplane. It's for the w What the Yeah. Sir, now when you talked about different pinouts, different protocols, OLED
• 14:30 - 15:00 panels actually have a different pin out than LCDs. And since no one DIYs OLED panels, I had to reverse engineer them from a data dump on Linux from the Asus laptop that used to have them. So after doing some reverse engineering and maybe procuring a data sheet, this is the cable that is needed to drive the display. Very, very fine pitch 40 pin cable and it's impedance matched to the EDP specifications. And that's at least one thing that you know they go by somewhat. How do you source one of these? How do you know it's the right one? Yeah. So on Tao they actually sell
• 15:00 - 15:30 um OLED EDP cables. And so I just bought one and pray that it works. Unfortunately it didn't really work because these cables actually convert from a standard LCD pin out to an OLED pin out which is not what I actually want. Oh cuz you want to go native. Yes. I want to go OLED to OLED. OLED. Yes. So then what did you have to do? So, what I did was I made two of these boards. They look wildly different from one another because one of them works and one of them doesn't. Can you guess which one works and which one doesn't, Lionus? I'm going to say this one works. How did you
• 15:30 - 16:00 know? Because it's just simpler. He's right. He's right. So, actually, it came. Again, we've designed a couple products. RF engineering is kind of black magic. So, a lot of the signals you can't really probe. You just have to guess based on vibes. So, my guess was that this was just too much loss. And you know it looks really really cursed plug in its HDMI but actually the chips the chip the RK3588 itself convert uh has a multiplexer inside the chip that takes either HDMI or embedded display
• 16:00 - 16:30 port and sends it out. Right. So what I actually did was I changed the Linux kernel driver or the device tree to output EDP off of this HDMI port instead. And um then you went straight into here. Boom. Yeah. And after a lot of kernel development and some device a lot of device redefinition development, it just works. Plug it in and it just works as a native display. Let's talk about the trackpad. This thing feels great. Yeah. Is this glass? It is glass. Glass topped.
• 16:30 - 17:00 Man, everyone should just use a trackpad with a glass top like this. Sorry. What gesture did you want me to? If you do three finger like that, I got a Mac with Hey, look at that. Oh, I love it. Fun fact, by the way, Linux had that like a decade before anyone else did. I have a spare trackpad right here. It's a module from Aotech. A Zotch. A Zotch. So, they're an OEM trackpad manufacturer. I decided to just buy a module and modify it to fit within
• 17:00 - 17:30 this laptop. They don't actually don't make it anymore. I think they were losing money selling them. So, it's too bad that they don't continue to sell them because for DIYers that dev kits can be an absolute lifesaver. I want to hear the speakers. Your speakers? Oh, they will shock you. What flavor of Linux are we on right now? Almost identical. Yeah. Also going to You know the crazy thing is if you press it down back lit and not full lit whereas I'm just lit. Why am I flat? I'm drinking. I
• 17:30 - 18:00 I said I was going to blow you away, right? Yeah. You didn't say if it was going to be in a good way or a bad way. Well, I certainly can't call you a liar then. Now, I have a question for you. You obviously are using an ARMbased chip for cost and power efficiency reasons and also because there's no way Intel's going to send you, you know, the drawings that you would need to develop an Intelbased laptop or whatever. Did you really feel like that was that much of a compromise these days? I think with
• 18:00 - 18:30 the RK 3588, it really wasn't that big of a compromise because you can do pretty much everything that you'd expect on a mid low-end laptop. Of course, you can't play, you know, Balders's Gate or something, but sure, you know, you can do, you know, regular everyday tasks on it, no problem. Theoretically, there is a project that's working on having Windows run on RK3588 based chips. But the development it requires to support custom hardware like mine where I made a motherboard and I made the power system and driving the display. It require a lot of work on to develop the firmware
• 18:30 - 19:00 itself to boot the laptop and get it to a working state. That's super cool. I want to see Minecraft. So, you said 4K 60. I guess you meant 4K 60 Hz, not 4K 60 frames per second. Well, you see, if you look down at the ground, you get 60 fps. I see. Yeah. But, you know, it's playable. It's playable. Especially on Bedwars Hypixel where you're actually rendering a lot less than a world. You actually hit quite high frame rates. It looks great, right? It does. It does
• 19:00 - 19:30 look great. There's no webcam. No. What was your reason though? Well, publicly, it's for privacy, but honestly, it's just so difficult to implement something so thin. I didn't have the time and the capability to fit in a full webcam and run it through the dis hard display. And it's easy to complain about webcams. It's really hard to make a better one. I am playing video games right now on this laptop which looks like a real laptop and obviously has some rough edges. Yep. It's falling apart a little. What would
• 19:30 - 20:00 you say is your biggest specialty that helped you execute this? It's the making these circuit boards myself. Yeah. And you can see here he's got his own silk screening. This board here is clearly a lot smaller than the development board here. Got your own socketed M.2, your own socketed Wi-Fi module slot. The fact that this works is a small miracle. Are you doubting my skill, Lionus? Nope. I'm saying that the fact that your skill exists is a small miracle. Thank you.
• 20:00 - 20:30 Thank you. I'm calling you a miracle. Take a compliment. Thank you, Lionus. I appreciate it. Wow. And that's it. Sorry. I have this one too. And then we just put the uh the rock chip, daughter board, brain board, whatever you want to call it, on on there. Boom. Just like that. This is outstanding. Like the density here. I would be impressed if I saw this on a professional product, let alone, no offense, but from like some kid. How
• 20:30 - 21:00 many layers is this? Six layers. So I have the top and bottom layer for signal and power. The second two layers for impedance matching as a ground reference plane and the middle two layers as power rails. So every trace on the high-speed signaling like the USBC, USBA, SD card, they are all impedance match in particular the u uh embedded display port signaling. Everything in this region is impedance controlled and impedance calculated, simulated, all of that to make sure that the signals don't
• 21:00 - 21:30 get interfered with on its way to whatever we need to do. And that stuff is a that stuff is a and a half. Like, wow. Now, the last question that I'm sure people are going to be asking is this project obviously raised your profile a fair bit. Have you gotten any interesting job offers? Yeah, I can't disclose much, but I did get uh more job offers than the number on my hands, which is great. I'm super grateful for that. Yeah. And I got to make a a video with you. Well, I mean, that's the best thing I got. Sure.
• 21:30 - 22:00 Yeah. Yeah. The guys who work here can see how excited they are about it. Wow. Really? But I bet whoever gave them to him doesn't dance around topless like a firefighter. It's a little traumatizing. I can send you the design files for the circuit boards because a lot of people wonder how you make circuit boards like this. pretty much anyone can get a circuit board made. This cost $60. $60? Yeah. Like it is shockingly affordable. With this out of the way, what's your
• 22:00 - 22:30 next big project? Yeah. So, I have two projects I'm trying I'm trying to get to right now. One is a super super light mouse that doesn't have a battery, and I'm going to leave it at that. It's going to be super light. There's no battery, but it's wireless. Okay. No spoilers. You'll have to subscribe to his channel. What's the other one? I hopefully in the future I'll get to making a second revision of the laptop. or I'm gonna have a better chip, better everything, and maybe maybe get to making some kits. Yeah, that would actually be really cool. I mean, you've open sourced all of this, right? That's right. Yeah. Uh everything you see on this table is completely open source on
• 22:30 - 23:00 my GitHub. That's super cool. So, we're going to have that linked in the video description. I love this keyboard. The the keyboard, dude. I This is really cool. This is a really cool showcase piece. But you really like the keyboard, but this is this is this is a product. This is that that's that's very cool. Thank you. Yeah. And you know what else is cool? Firing Colton shouldn't be a joke. What we actually take to fire Colton. Okay, Dennis, we talk about this every month. ODO is sponsoring this video. Take this. All right, sit down.
• 23:00 - 23:30 Let's talk. Let's check his attendance. We got to find something. Oh, man. He's actually been really reliable. Wait, what? And he's been doing all this OT. He might actually be working really hard. Dennis, showing up to work doesn't mean he's actually working. Yeah, that's true. Let's check his goals, then. Excuse me. He actually accomplished all of his goals. Dennis, you need to pay me more. Okay. What if he's been expenses his personal stuff as work? That can be a big problem. Oh, wow. He's expensed like $3,000 in March. What? Pizza party with friends for $900. That sounds very
• 23:30 - 24:00 suspicious. Yeah, I didn't get invited to this party. Con, you're so fire. Con, you're fire. Happy birthday. Never mind. If you guys enjoyed this video, then you will enjoy Byron's deeper look, which as I admitted before, I have only skimmed. But now I get to watch fully. Um, and I'm really excited for that because he goes into a little bit more depth on some of the individual design choices as well as like the specs which we kind of glossed over here. So guys, you're going to want to check out his video. You're
• 24:00 - 24:30 going to want to check out his GitHub. Is there anything else you want to shout out since you're here? Thank you to everyone for supporting me. Hi mom. Thank you for having me. Oh yeah, my pleasure, dude. Uh oh my god. Really nice to meet you, man. They see me less.