For at least three weeks now, I’ve been thinking about entering the OSHWLab Stars 2026 contest.
After giving a lot of thought to entering the contest on my own, with a personal project, I am writing these words to tell you that I would like the Haiku community to enter the contest.
The idea is to create a RISC-V laptop based on the design of the old IBM ThinkPads, such as the T60 or T80 models.
I would like a member of Haiku Inc. to review the contest rules.
The Grand Prize is $30,000.
EasyEDA would cover most of the manufacturing costs, including PCB, 3D printing, and CNC machining.
That would give us a fully functional first prototype, which would be an advantage if we wanted to contact a company to mass produce it. It would also give us an advantage in marketing and attracting new users.
My initial idea is to use EasyEDA Pro for PCB creation and TinkerCAD for the enclosure.
If anyone is thinking that FreeCAD is better than TinkerCAD, I have to say that my PC is broken, and I don’t have the money to replace it, so I’m now using a first-generation Raspberry Pi, which forces me to use only web applications.
I’m not a hardware expert,so I can’t be of any help here,but I like your idea
I’m really interested about your progress and how a perfect Haiku laptop would look like.
Maybe I’ll buy one when it’s ready and not too expensive.
I already have more than enough laptops,but none specifically manufactured for Haiku yet
It seems to me it would be relatively easy to manufacture a laptop for Haiku. Source some old hardware that works on x86_64 Haiku, et voilà. I don’t know the industry, but seems not at all impossible that if you decided on a wifi card that’s a few years old, you could find that someone has a boatload of them they’d unload for next to nothing, and so forth for all the devices.
That could be an option, yes, but I wouldn’t want to have to play detective trying to figure out what the pins on the WiFi module’s PCIe card do, or the pins on the graphics card.
I prefer to choose a reputable manufacturer, such as Microchip Inc., and select some of their excellent products, along with the extensive documentation that accompanies each chip.
My concept of a laptop is very different from that of most manufacturers today. I want my laptop to be easily disassembled, I want to use a single type of screwdriver to disassemble the case or any other component, I want the battery cells to be of a popular type that I can buy at an electronics store, I want to be able to replace the CPU or RAM or whatever without having to get a PhD from Harvard University, I want to be able to consult the motherboard documentation to diagnose a fault.
