Building an Open-Source Laptop with Byran Huang

0:00Byron Huang is a full-stack developer who recently made headlines in the hackerspace when he created the Ennionee, which is a highly integrated open source laptop. The effort was a massive undertaking and showcased great design, hardware, and software. In this episode, Byron joins the show with Gregor Vand to talk about his work on the Eniani laptop. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn.

0:52welcome byron thank you for having me gregor it's an honor to be here yeah so very excited to have you here basically you put out a hacker news post a few weeks ago that kind of blew up big time about the project we're going to be speaking about today. And you also put out an amazing video about it, which we'll maybe get on to. I think what struck me the most was the fact that I looked you up on LinkedIn kind of after that post, and I thought you were a teacher at high school. And it turns out you're a student at high school. Is that right? Yeah, which was just kind of blew my mind. So let's get into it.

1:29Could you describe what is NE on E? Yeah, that's a great question, Gregor. And I'd like to first describe the mission of it. It's a project that tries to show that anyone, and hence the name, any on underscore E, if you combine it all, it spells anyone, that anyone can build a laptop themselves. And it doesn't have to be something that you have to go out and buy. Of course, feel free to go out and buy one and you're going to get higher quality, higher performance, and something that you probably use on a daily basis. But I wanted to show that people, a maker, enthusiast, if you put in the effort and you put in the energy and the research, in a few months, you can create something that you can hand off to a family member or someone who's not very familiar with technology.

2:13And they'd be like, yeah, this is a laptop, something that they can use on a day-to-day basis. I'm not really targeting gaming or AI or anything like that. I'm just targeting like a nice solid laptop that people can use while not really having any quirks or anything like that. And just having this machine that everything is built from scratch. There's no secrets behind the hood. And that was the mission where I try and make everything from scratch as much as possible while achieving as high performance and resembling as close to a modern thin and light laptop as I could. Amazing. Yeah, you mentioned both in post you've put up and the video, you were trying to disprove the idea that technology is either repairable and open or integrated and closed.

2:54Like, how would you kind of describe? Because I guess, especially in software people would think well open is open right so what is the difference here when it comes to especially a laptop and i think also there's something interesting i was thinking about it this morning which was you know when i was growing up people would build i'm going to put massive air quotes here because the way that you do it is just so much more impressive but they would build their own computer right so maybe could we also look at that distinction where people are thinking oh yeah i built my own computer 20 years ago this is quite different and maybe you could sort of just set the scene for why that's quite different.

3:26Yeah, I'd love to. So, anion is this quantum particle. I'll start with that. It's sort of something that's neither fermionic or bosonic. So, I took quantum mechanics in my junior year, my junior spring term. So, our school goes by trimesters. And I was looking at these quantum particles. I was trying to think of a name for this laptop. And my mission the entire time was, what you said previously, to disprove that technology is either open or closed and integrated or sort of sprawled out and not very tightly packed together. And I'm mainly discussing the hardware aspect of it, where when you buy an Apple product, you expect everything to work out of the hood.

4:02You open it up and everything just works. You've got the Apple ecosystem. The computer is nice and solid. It feels like a polished product. But then if you go, and of course, it's not really repairable. It's everything soldered in and it's super hard to get into. There's adhesives. it's just not very easy to repair. And that's something that iFixit and Louis Rossman have been trying to fight for in the community for a very long time now. And I wanted to play my part in it because I also hate not being able to repair my own devices. And, you know, looking at them from the inside, they're nothing different than what you can make as a creator, as a maker yourself.

4:36So my mission was to be able to create something that's really integrated in the sense that it comes in at this, My laptop's 17.5 millimeters thick. If I remember correctly, it's been a while, but it's almost as thin as a MacBook Pro. And you can't really tell the difference from the outside that it is something that you made in the back of a classroom, in my case. And so when I'm looking at that, I was really targeting this idea that people say these computer manufacturers like Apple, like Dell, like Lenovo, when they start closing in on their ecosystem, they often quote the idea that we need to solder in the RAM, we need to solder in the CPU, we need to do XYZ because we need to get it smaller.

5:18We need to get it more integrated. And I really disagree with that. I think it's just a lack of trying, a lack of engineering effort, might I say. And so that was my mission the entire time, to aim at this idea where if you aim your goal at one specific point, where building a laptop that resembles and performs and feels like a modern Thinolite, you can achieve at least 80 of it of course you're not going to get to 100 of it and i never claimed to but just trying to get to some place where it feels right it feels right and nothing is a secret where you know you can open up everything is replaceable in there you can straight up replace the cpu if you want place the ram replace every single part of it and since all the circuit boards all the software's open and all the hardware's open as well you can take any part of it and build your own spin to it so everyone can have their truly unique laptop and that brings me to the second point where because i built everything from scratch including like designing the chassis in cad i made every single route on the circuit boards by hand so there's over a few thousand in total and by creating everything from as ground up as possible people can open them up in free open source software like key cad vs code obviously it's just everything's just linux and key cad pcbs as well as a less open source but still free ptc entree for the cad i couldn't do free CAD because I was just not really familiar with it and as a school project I needed to get it done as fast as I can and I just used what I was familiar with and Onshape seemed like the best choice because of my time limit.

6:45I was already familiar with it and you can distribute it really quickly through the cloud. People can just open up a link and take a look on it because PTC Onshape is a cloud-based CAD software so it's really nice to be able to distribute things even though it's not as open source. And so combining all of that it's sort of a way where I can say anyone can come in, and hence the name, make modifications or learn from it in the same way that I was learning from other open source projects like keyboards on the ZMK firmware community, other systems like, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but Olamex, this is open source hardware community.

7:17And a bunch of these companies that release their hardware openly, I want to sort of achieve the same, but accomplish it for laptops, because that's something that isn't really well represented in the open source hardware community. so that's a great way to kind of frame it which is that why has this not really been done in the laptop space because well at the end of the day laptops have always been just like how much thinner lighter can we get this thing gaming laptops used to be always so much bigger and chunkier at least again when i was growing up and so it was this trade-off you always had to make which was like do you want a kind of slightly ugly chunky power laptop or do you want some thin thing and way back in the day i had like the asus eepc which was like this little kind of first netbook thing which i thought was awesome but couldn't do anything basically just ran linux and i mean i still remember back when i've had apple laptops for decades unfortunately at this point shows my age a little bit but i just still remember how much i loved being able to take the chassis off it and being able to replace the memory and replace the battery and replace things and as you call out that's kind of just not possible when it comes to a high performance laptop up.

8:26That's right. And building off of that, Gregor, it's this idea that I don't just pick the parts. I pick a motherboard. I pick a chip. I make everything, every single capacitor I picked as well. And every single resistor, every single trace, every calculation I did in my head to make sure that when you get that board in the end, like there's no secrets at all. Like I can explain every single minute engineering decision I made in designing the laptop all the way from, you know, the metal being milled it's aluminum 6061 cnc from jlc pcb all the way up to the display i picked which is a 4k amoled display and it looks beautiful it looks if you put it next to like a macbook pro i'm i have a macbook pro right now put it right next to it actually looks just as good if not better because it has a higher pixel density and deeper contrast it's something that by picking everything from as scratch as possible with limits i couldn't make the display from scratch obviously I can't place every single pixel in with a tweezer or something like that.

9:24But by picking things and doing it from as scratch as possible, when you get this laptop, you don't just have to pick the chip like the main CPU. You can pick every single chip like your USB-C negotiation chip. You can pick your internal USB expansion hub chip. You can pretty much do every little thing possible. You can switch out your DC-DC converters that take your battery voltage and plugs it into the actual chip. You can pretty much change everything that you want on the system and perhaps moreover when people come and sort of people like me when I was even smaller I was wondering how does a laptop work and if something like this had existed I think it would really help me get a grasp of you know how modern technology moves in a way that isn't really possible from just taking something apart because you can take open a laptop MacBook or Lenovo or Dell laptop apart but you can't really look into the exact circuits and you can't look at the exact software they're using the BIOS you You can't look at the layout of the circuit board.

10:18And by doing something like this, anyone can go on to my GitHub and download it or use the web viewer that I have. And then just look at how the circuit board was made and see all the engineering decisions. And that's something that I also really wanted to do. Sort of inspire the next generation of makers, enthusiasts, and people that follow the same path as me. I've never learned engineering formally. There's a lot of people in the YouTube comments and in the Hacker News said that, you know, I must have really, really well-off engineering parents, or I've had very educated teachers that helped me along.

10:46But my teacher has never been educated in engineering. He was just there for emotional support. And my parents do not do anything related to engineering. So, you know, I've had a lot of support, I must say, along the way. My school has been very supportive. But everything that I came to in the end was purely engineering decisions on my part through my experience having done engineering for quite a long time. Actually, not that quite a long time, But really putting my foot forward and saying, I want to pursue engineering and open source hardware. Amazing. I'd love to get into some of those decisions.

11:18So I think one that's kind of interesting is what's termed system on a chip. Yes. Could you maybe walk through which one did you choose? Why did you choose it? And maybe you step back from that as well. What is the system on a chip? What parts of the system does that even encompass? Yep. So there's two levels to my CPU in LA. And most people will call it a CPU rather than an SoC, which is a system-on-a-chip. A system-on-a-chip is essentially a chip that integrates your CPU, your GPU, and usually RAM. In the case of the modern MacBook, you do integrate RAM into the system, where your RAM is physically on the same quote-unquote die as the rest of the chip, your CPU and your GPU and everything in between.

12:02on my end, I chose the RK3588 SoC, where it has the CPU and the GPU and pretty much everything you need, the memory controller, all the essential parts of a modern computer is in that one consolidated chip. And by doing that, it allows me to save a lot of work integrating other parts. So one limitation that I had throughout this project was time. As a senior project, I only had one term to accomplish it. So I started over the summer, so I had summer break to work on it. And then I had the fall term. I had one class replaced with this quote-unquote laptop senior project to work on it. So I only had a few hours a day and only three months, excluding summer.

12:39So I really had six months to work on this project. And throughout the time, I had to do college applications, homework. I had an internship over this past summer as well. So just getting all my free time in, I couldn't trace everything out the CPU myself. That would take hundreds, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of traces and definitely thousands of hours of engineering effort to pull off if I was implementing the CPU or the SoC directly on the circuit board. So what I chose was called an SOM, system on a module, where it's on this much bigger circuit board. And this also came with many, many limitations, including signal integrity and thermals.

13:16But that allowed me to just plop this little kind of like Raspberry Pi compute module, if you may. it's sort of like slotting a GPU or RAM into a modern computer. It has every single connection you need, HDMI, USB, power, pretty much every connection that you have on a regular modern laptop but you just slot it right in with that CPU on the circuit board. And what that meant was that I know at least some part of my system works out of the box. If I had implemented everything, the DDR4 memory and the chip and everything on this one single monolithic circuit board and I plugged it in and it doesn't work.

13:49I don't have the engineering effort and the team and the millions of dollars of equipment needed to debug high-speed signals and all those power-on timings. So buying that system on a module meant that, okay, at least it's not as open as I wished in promoting the chip from scratch. That's something I certainly aim to do in my next revision. I'm discussing with some open source efforts that will help me in designing everything and putting it directly onto the chip. And I'm super excited for that. And it should be higher performance than this round. and throughout all of that it's this effort to make as many things from scratch as possible while making it reasonable like you know me as a single person i'm not going to claim to have carved out the metal cnc'd it by hand myself or anodized it myself or made the display from scratch there's no limitations to what i can do in those six months so that was another corner if you may say cut to know that okay when i power on this laptop at least one part of it works and another Another good benefit to it is that the system auto module, the CM3588 system auto module, allows me to pull the device tree and the Linux drivers directly from FriendlyELEC, who developed this system auto module, and test it readily on one of their development boards that is made and known working with the SOM.

15:03And that was really nice because at least some part of it, again, I knew it was going to work. And I did this, in particular, this proved so pivotal to the laptop when I was trying to drive the 4K AMOLED display. And in the embedded DisplayPort connections, it's a super high bit rate protocol and in hardware development. If your signals go fast enough, your physics sort of get distorted and you can't just run a single line and expect it to work like if you plug in a battery. You sort of have these quantum mechanical limitations, literally, where your electrons are moving so fast they start oscillating.

15:35And if you don't do your calculations and you don't do your considerations correctly, your electrons will sort of move backwards in a way. And so that's called signal loss. And that's something that I was really fighting for and making sure your electrons move through your trace as expected at such high frequencies. And my embedded display port connections were, I think, somewhere in the 3 to 5 gigahertz range, which is Wi-Fi slash Bluetooth. But you're trying to run it from one connection to the other, and you're not emitting it through air. So you have a whole different set of considerations called transmission line theory.

16:08And so doing all of that, I had to make sure that before I made my first circuit board, my display would work. Because if I put in all the work to make my first main board, and I couldn't debug what I expected to be the hardest, and thankfully I was right in the end, the embedded display port signals, there was no way I could pull it off in the correct time. If I got my circuit board and the display doesn't power on, well, shoot, you know, I don't have any way to know whether it's the chip that's wrong, my code that's wrong, or anything in between or the display or the hardware. So what I did was I took one of the development boards that the system on a module was being sold with and I desoldered the HDMI port peripherals.

16:44And I basically modified it so that the chip multiplexes between HDMI and an embedded display port. And you can change that in the internal embedded software for the chip. So when you load in your bootloader, you can tell the chip to either multiplex embedded display port or HDMI out of it. And so what I did was, it's still through a physical HDMI connector but what's actually sending is embedded display port signals because when I booted it up I hijacked the device tree binary and I switched the multiplexer to output embedded display port and then I made a custom little circuit board that took the signals and routed it to what is the internal embedded display port connection that's typically used on laptops and for sure my 4k AMOLED display and you know I did not expect it to work And it didn't.

17:27I spent around two months trying to figure out what was going on. And the difficulty that came with that is because embedded display port is basically an undocumented protocol. The only time it's really used is in laptops. And so all these companies, Lenovo, Apple, Dell, and so on and so forth, they keep this sort of under the hood. Because there's really no need for other people to develop with it anyways. It's a horrible protocol. And it's basically the same thing as DisplayPort, but everything's much weaker. The actual signal strength is much lower. and I'm still to this day confused on why.

17:58Of course I see the reasons but I feel like you can definitely heavily improve on this protocol. You might as well just send it over to DisplayPort directly and of course there's limitations to that but in the end it's a super difficult protocol to work with and Linus of LTT talks about it a little bit on his podcast of what's barely considered a standard because it's so weird and goofy and vague in all these different ways. Every single nice little caveat that I didn't expect was that LCD displays or IPS displays actually have a different pinout than OLED displays. So the only few articles and resources I had on embedded DisplayPort were on LCDs and their power on timings and their bit rates and their specific driver protocols were different than OLEDs.

18:39So I was pretty much on my own. I had nothing to go off of except for this Asus boot log that was dumped from the same display that I had to go off of. So that just had like snippets of little metadata coming off the display when you first initialize the connection so I had to reverse engineer from that to drive the display and in the end I figured out the signal loss it was really just because going from the HDMI connector to the actual embedded display port connector through my little driver board I shortened the distance from v1 or r1 to v2 I literally shortened the distance by a few millimeters and I switched out a connector so instead of going from female to male to male to female.

19:18I went directly from female to male. So I skipped that female to male adapter part. Just from those two changes, the display just magically worked. So I was super glad. And that allowed me to basically use this development board as a jumping off point and allowed me to create the rest of the system around knowing that the display will work. And so that was a huge, huge bet that I made. If that didn't work, I really don't know where I'd today so i'm super glad that my bet paid off and it was two months of just black box debugging where i had to make sure that all the software as far as i knew worked i didn't have a scope to prove 500 signals those cost hundreds of thousands of dollars so i sort of had to make sure that as much as i knew the software worked because when i first got my board and the display didn't work and the chip didn't work the chip couldn't drive the display i had no idea whether it was my software that was broken or my hardware.

20:12So I spent about two months figuring out every single little piece of the software and ensuring that my software was correct. And when I did that, I was like, okay, well, I guess it's the hardware that's broken. So I made a second revision with the few theories that I had, signal loss, signal integrity, and in the end it did work. So I'm happy that my gamble paid off. Amazing. Tired of babysitting autoscalers and overspending on cloud costs? Meet Thoris, the platform that makes engineers heroes to their finance and business leaders. Thoris intelligently manages Kubernetes clusters, automatically right-sizing and scaling workloads while preventing downtime from traffic spikes.

20:50It anticipates usage and capacity needs, so systems stay fast, reliable, and efficient, without constant tuning. Teams using Thoris cut cloud spend by 40-60%. Thoris predicts compute and GPU demand before it happens, keeping performance smooth and costs in check. Stop wasting compute and guessing your resource needs. Let Thoris handle your auto-scaling so your teams can focus on building. Find out how much you can save with Thoris. Visit thoris.ai and try our cloud savings calculator. Was the, I guess like system on a chip and the display piece here, is that where you, I'm trying to remember from the video, is that kind of where you started and you were like, if this doesn't work, then there's no point in this project?

21:35or where did that fit in? Yeah, so when I first started this project, there were a few things that I want to keep in my mind. And I oversimplified in the video, so I'm going to go into a little more depth. I wanted the RK3588 already. Like I had decided on that chip when I started this project because it's such a good chip and it's still the fastest on the market. I think the Rockchip is coming out with the RK3688 in a few months or in a few years. I don't know how their timeline works. And my second revision of the laptop will also use a much higher end chip. But I knew that I couldn't use Intel or AMD because the amount of NDAs and the amount of effort needed to just get my hands on one of those chips and be able to implement it from an open source standpoint is basically impossible.

22:17Like even if I got that chip, there's pretty much zero chance that I'd be able to release the schematics openly online just from the inherent business model of Intel and AMD. But in terms of ROC chip and in terms of these smaller companies, they don't really care and they release their schematics openly online already. So it doesn't conflict with their business model of selling chips to literally just developers and consumers already. And that was one thing. And the RK3588 is much higher performance, about twice the performance of the Raspberry Pi 4, and about one and a half times the performance of a Raspberry Pi 5.

22:49So a lot of people were also asked, you know, why don't I just put a Raspberry Pi 5 compute module in there? And the answer is it's just not as performant. I don't get the same I.O., the same performance as if I had the RK3588. So that's one thing that I wanted to do. The second thing I wanted to do was a wireless removable keyboard. And it's a bit hard to describe, but essentially the keyboard is only, I remember, 7 millimeters thin. And correct me if I'm wrong there. I don't really remember. It's been a while. But when you hold it, it's literally like holding a piece of cardboard. And it feels super light.

23:21It feels super thin. But it feels sturdy because it's aluminum. And it's a fully mechanical keyboard, and it's wireless. So the actual battery inside is only a millimeter thin. and it fits directly underneath a ultra-thin circuit board. And on top of it are these Cherry MX mechanical switches that are only otherwise found in highest-end alien computers. They're the Cherry MX ultra-low-profile switches. And I was able to get them from Taobao, which is a Chinese AliExpress, and chip them over, and I soldered them on by hand. And combining all of that and the one-millimeter-thin battery, I was able to get the keyboard, because I was also running super-high-efficiency firmware, the ZMK keyboard firmware, This keyboard lasts a couple months on a single charge.

24:02I haven't really charged it since I built it. And sort of adding all that together, my second goal again, so the first goal was RK3588. The second goal was accomplishing this wireless keyboard that slots into the centerpiece of your computer. And another addition to that is because you can just take it off magnetically, that's how I designed it to be, the computer is more repairable than any other computer because you can literally pop off the keyboard and every single piece of the electronics is exposed directly to you. Of course, that brings the dumb danger. Like if you spill water into it, you know, you're screwed.

24:30But outside of that, you know, just from a purely engineering slash repairability standpoint, no screws needed. You literally pop it off and it's just there in front of you. Every single component that you want access to. And so those are two main things that I wanted to implement on my computer. And then the third one came, which is the 4K AMOLED display. When I was looking through display options and I was like, wow, I didn't know they sold 4K 13.3 inch displays to consumers. And the reason I wanted that so much was because one of the first laptops I got was back in middle school for me. And I was lucky enough to get the Razer Blade Stealth 13, and I tried it out.

25:07And I had this really gorgeous Ola 13.3-inch 4K display. And people say a 4K display on a 13.3-inch laptop, that's a huge waste of pixel density. But I really love how beautiful it looked because you literally can't see the pixels. and it's sort of like a strong divide between people that say it's a waste and people that say it's an amazing choice and it looks beautiful and on my end i love the way it looks especially on an oval display so i was like okay i see this choice it's on taobao it's ready for me to use i'm using it i'm buying it you know there's no turning back i'd hate myself if i couldn't get the 4k display to work otherwise it just looked like a crappy laptop and another aspect of that was because i knew that my laptop wouldn't be able to perform nearly as well as a macbook i mean this chip is about a third of the performance as an apple m1 like a base m1 chip in terms of raw arm 64 performance i couldn't beat any computer and like have a highlight saying that i outperformed xyz but i can say that i have a higher display resolution i have a better feeling keyboard i have this wireless keyboard and have a bunch of these little oddball quirks to it that are also very useful like i use this keyboard as a debugging keyboard on other computers as well like i can just pop it off and connect it to another computer however I want because it's just over Bluetooth.

26:22So combining all of that, it's just a really amazing option that, and these three choices are the ones that really influence my decision going forward. And of course, there's like other ones that are like CNC aluminum chassis, you know, a nice trackpad, battery that's roughly the same size and capacity as a modern battery pack, and circuit boards that are cheap and accessible and easy to view and so on and so forth. But combining all of that, that's sort of the goal set of my laptop and that really influenced every single decision that i made going forward from there on amazing i hadn't maybe fully appreciated the wire and the wireless keyboard being i mean it sounds like part of the reason being that you can pop it off and then just kind of get in there sounds to me that's like i'm quite into kind of like car mechanics for example and it just sounds like being able to pop the hood on a car and being able to go in i think that's just incredible can we talk a little bit about so again maybe just taking on if we want to like again slightly air quote this, but software, because this is sort of software that just I think none of us in the software world really think to touch ever, but battery management.

27:22And I believe you implemented custom battery management. Is that right? That's correct. Yeah. Could you talk to that? Yeah, for sure. That is correct. And that part is really complicated. And I made a huge mistake when I was making it. It's still a mistake that I regret to this day. And it's not implementing a proper embedded controller software. And I'll go from the top. Pretty much every computer nowadays. There's the CPU or the GPU or the SOC. You have your main processing chips. And that's what you as an end user access every day. That's what you see when you open Task Manager on Windows or you run HTOP.

27:57That's what you see the performance of. But there's another chip that's working just as hard. And people don't talk about it at all. It's the embedded controller on the laptop. And it's the same as if it's an Arduino on the main board, along with the big chips. And this one is like a little little worker that's making sure every part of your system is working properly so there's a huge number of gpi opens general purpose input output and it takes input from your buck converters to see if your power is good it takes input from your wireless controllers it takes input from of course your battery management and a bunch as any peripherals that you don't think of to access on a day-to-day basis that your little ec or your embedded controller is the one that manages all the firmware and the controls associated with this there's insane number of GPI opens that connect to every power system, every peripheral system that is managed from the EC.