Framework Cyberdeck - DIY Portable PC

this is a framework laptop motherboard and in this video I'm going to show you how I turned it into the heart of this a custom cyber deck of my own design it's a fully capable Windows computer but it's also got some really unique features and I'm going to be making everything open source so if you like this project feel free to download the files but what really is a cyber deck anyway and why build one the term was originally coined by William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer but the best modern definition I could find was an artisan crafted computer in other words these things don't really exist in the real world so it's kind of up to individual interpretation I feel like we live in a world where every phone looks something like this and every portable computer looks something like this I missed the crazy designs of the 9s and 2000s where every computer phone and MP3 player look different and I love building stuff so why not make something cool first of all I needed to decide what type of Hardware to build this project around the most popular choice for something like this would be a Raspberry Pi they're small low power and they have gpio pins that you can control stuff with and they're pretty cheap well if you don't count the scalpers the downside is that they're kind of slow even compared to a mediocre laptop and there's no m.2 slot so you're stuck using micro SD cards for storage now they also run Linux instead of Windows which is either a total deal breaker or the greatest thing ever depending on who you ask I don't want to get involved in that debate I also thought about using a latte Panda they're small and powerful and they run Windows but they're also pretty expensive which brings us to our third option and the one that I went with framewor now before I get ahead of myself I should probably explain what framework is for those who might not know basically they're a company that's making laptops that you can build upgrade and repair yourself this isn't a sponsorship or anything I bought all of the parts myself and they had no idea that I was making this video I just really like the idea of being able to upgrade things over time instead of having to replace the entire device so here's why I picked this it's got pretty good performance the whole IO system is modular and based around USBC the company sells all the parts individually the motherboard itself is really thin and pretty SM small so it's easy to fit into a case and I managed to get one on eBay secondhand for a pretty good deal I also went ahead and grabbed one of their batteries since you know it was literally made for this system the main board comes with the processor and cooling fan pre-installed I went with 16 GB of RAM and I also found a good deal on a 500 gig Western Digital black SSD these should be plenty for what I want to do with this thing I booted the system up and installed Windows to make sure everything was going to work together properly so far so good so with that sorted out it was time to start designing everything I surround it I've always liked the look of slab style computers like the old Tandy trs8 model 100 and its modern counterpart the Clockwork Dev term I don't know why but I just think these are cool I fully understand why clamshell laptops took over you get a much bigger screen and both the keyboard and screen are protected when it's closed for transport but where's the fun in that of course it is pretty useful to have a screen that can tilt toward you especially if you're going to use this thing sitting at a desk otherwise you end up looking at it from a weird angle but don't worry I've got to work around for that I feel like laptops in general aren't that ergonomic to use in a lot of situations I mean does anyone actually sit them on their lap it's pretty uncomfortable I wish you could hold the computer with both hands and still use it at the same time by using a small thumb controlled track ball mounted on the right side you get the option to hold it and still navigate around to address the screen angle issue a simple friction hinge mechanism can be added to allow the screen to flip up as much as 45° which is probably the most you would need with this design I'm able to use the computer in virtually any position comfortably well almost any position so that's the overall form factor sorted out but what about the features and functionality I mean I did call this thing my cyber deck so it better do something cool here's what I expect out of it I want all of the features of a normal laptop I want decent performance I want it to have solid input output options unlike certain computer Brands I wanted to have the ability to be easily wired into electronic circuits to make testing them easier this basically means a built-in Arduino I want it to have a cool cyberpunk aesthetic and I want it to be small enough to fit into a standard laptop bag easy right right so with the basic design parameters in hand I set out to find perhaps the most important part other than the motherboard the screen this needed to be determined early in the design phase because it directly affects the overall dimensions of the device I looked at a ton of options before I settled on this a 2400x 900 IPS display I found on Amazon I picked this because of its aspect ratio and size it's 8x3 ratio which is a lot more usable than some of the 32 by9 ones that I found those are so short and wide that even browsing the internet's kind of a challenge the screen is also capable of both being powered and supplied with video by a single USBC cable which is important to minimize clutter in my design it's got this driver board that connects to it via a ribbon cable as well as a little control board for menu options like brightness as well as input source selection volume control and more so I'll have to find space for those in the frame somewhere the next important part to figure out was the keyboard now I wanted to get something as thin and light as possible in order to minimize the bulk of the design but I also wanted it to still be completely usable I have a lot of issues with apple but they do make a decent keyboard so I went with a magic 2 keyboard for this project it's supposed to be used wirelessly but it does work if you plug in a cable as well it's thin light and very similar to my daily driver so perfect for this project as for the cable I found this one which has a super low profile plug on both ends which suits this project perfectly next the track ball I found this mini Optical track ball made by Logitech on eBay it's actually PS2 format and for my younger viewers out there I ain't talking about PlayStation 2 well it's all good because we can interface that with an art weo Pro micro so we can write a simple script that reads the PS2 data from the track ball and translates it to commands to move and click the mouse over USB here's what the code looks like for anyone that's interested I'll also put the link in the description additionally I soldered on some wires so that I'd be able to use the other pins later the one physical modification I had to make to this was to desolder and replace the capacitor with one that had longer leads so that I could bend it out of the way of the keyboard to avoid a minor clearance issue after that speakers framework already makes and sells these pretty cheap so I decided to just keep it simple and pick some up straight from them the only modification I had to do was to lengthen the wires on one side because they were way too short to fit my design these just plug into a four pin connector on the main board pretty easy one feature I really wanted to maintain was the swappable expansion Port cards on the 13-in laptops that framework sells you get four but because I was using one of these ports for video and at least one for input I was down to two accessible Ones Still it's such a cool feature to have that I decided to keep it and design around having the ability to swap them out in my design they're accessible from the left side of the device but I wanted a lot more IO ports than just that though and I also needed one USB for the keyboard and one for the track ball I found this six Port hub for a few bucks on Amazon and decided it was perfect it's got three usba ports two USBC ports and a full-size HDMI so I Incorporated it into the design in such a way that I could use all of them now that I had all the electronic components sorted out it was time to design a housing for them the real challenge here was how to cram everything into the smallest possible case if only there was some way to make them fit okay since that wasn't an option I decided to use my 3D printer to make a perfectly fitting skeleton to mount all the parts to and then cut some face plates to hold it all together think of it like a delicious sandwich except the bread is aluminum plate and the meat is the laptop parts and the cheese is the 3D printed frame and the mayonnaise is JB Weld okay I was hungry but that last bit just killed my appetite fortunately my 3D printer is a little on the small side so printing it all in one piece was a nogo which means I had to divide it up into four parts and glue them together given the complexities of all the components and how closely they fit together I had to do a couple revisions okay maybe more than a couple for the face plates I wanted something sturdy yet aesthetically pleasing so I went with some 8in aluminum sheet I was able to cut them out with my homemade CNC machine if you haven't seen my videos on that project be sure to check them out after this because I go into detail on how I designed and built it despite having limited tools but if you don't have access to a CNC machine there's still a variety of other ways to make these plates since they're really just 2D shapes you could cut them out of acrylic with a laser 3D print them or even make them out of wood or better yet you could use this video sponsor PCB way PCB way offers a variety of services ranging from PCB production and assembly to 3D printing and a variety of materials sheet metal fabrication injection molding CNC Machining and more you can quickly upload your files and get a quote immediately so if you want to build something like this you could simply download the files Link in the description and select your material finish and any post-processing operations like anodizing or tapping holes for Threads PCB way makes it easy to get custom parts for your projects even if you don't have the necessary tools now back to the video I found these plates on Amazon they're 12 by8 in and they came with these protective Coatings after peeling those off I bolted them down to the CNC spoil board and cut out the shapes with an 8 in two flute endmill each part required multiple tool paths and I did the the interior cutouts before going around the outside for the outline Cuts I had to leave some tabs so that they wouldn't move around during the final pass these I just removed with a hacksaw blade and then filed and sanded the edges of the material to clean it up I also sanded the faces of the material because I wanted a nice satin finish instead of the obnoxiously reflective and fingerprint showing surface that the material came with this also better matches the Apple keyboard's finish in addition I cut out some small plates to glue onto the frame where the Hing is attached this was because I wanted to have more than an e/ inch of material to tap for the bolts that secure those hinges given that they get a decent amount of force applied speaking of those this is what I went with they're pretty Compact and just about right for this application even if they are a little on the stiff side as I mentioned earlier having the option to Pivot the screen forward 45° is important for usability there were a couple more minor issues I ran into like the power button because of the placement of the keyboard I couldn't directly access the little power button on the main board so I had to solder on some wires and make a plug that would connect to an external switch because you know being able to actually turn on the computer always helps one more thing that I should probably mention is that I had to cut the outer rubber sheath off of both the USBC Hub and video cables this is because these were just too stiff and I needed to be able to bend them into the right positions so I carefully used a razor blade to remove them and then wrapped the remaining cables in black electrical tape now with that done it was time to start putting things together to do this I use JB Weld to hold the 3D printed parts to the aluminum plate this stuff is really strong and seems to hold up well over the long run I also glued the power button and the header pins as well as glued in the keyboard to the main face plate for the 3D printed Parts I used brass threaded inserts wherever a screw was required and for the aluminum plates I used a tap to create threads in the appropriate places once everything had dried for a solid 24 hours I started installing all of the electronic components I soldered the wires to the header pins then the battery went in first then the display driver board and control board which are actually mounted upside down because of the way their ribbon cables connect to the screen following that the motherboard went in along with five M4 bolts that secure it to the aluminum plate through standoffs which are incorporated into 3D printed frame I also plugged in the two expansion cards to make sure they were properly aligned then I inserted the Wi-Fi card and its mounting bolt as well as the track ball module and the Arduino which is kind of just tucked in between it and the USB hub finally I screwed in the front keyboard assembly with the track ball buttons in place those were also 3D printed by the way for the screen I attached the hinges first then slid the display into its holding frame then screwed in two short M3 bolts at the top which terminate in threaded inserts as well as four longer bolts that go all the way through the front plate frame hinges and into four nuts at the back and last but not least I stuck on some rubber feet to prevent the Slick aluminum plate from sliding around on flat surfaces and also to provide some space for air to flow into the fan intake area let's take a look at the finished product and walk through the design features right away the first thing that's noticeable apart from the form factor is the extensive use of aluminum along with the exposed screw heads this really gives it a cool industrial look and feel another thing you might have noticed is the diagonal cuts on the right hand side those are mostly cosmetic but they also do provide a nice surface to grip when picking it up the track ball also stands out in a world where touch pads have become the standard it's definitely on the small side and it takes some getting used to but it's fine for basic navigation as I mentioned earlier you can hold the device and still use your right thumb to navigate the buttons are a little bit unconventional I have the top one mapped to left click and the bottom one to right click but this is strictly a matter of preference since it can be changed in the code there's no scroll wheel which is kind of annoying to be honest I probably should have tried to incorporate a rotary encoded or something but you can obviously still use the up and down arrow keys to scroll I generally use this and all other laptops with a mouse anyway so this whole feature is more of a convenience than anything else regarding the keyboard there's not much to say it works fine the only thing worth mentioning is that there are a couple of Apple specific buttons that don't do anything I'd like to find a way to map those to some custom functions if it's possible one thing you might have noticed is the shiny spot on the screen frame that's because it's hitting the other plate when I open it apparently the beveled Edge isn't perfectly consistent and this must be a high spot I should have anticipated this and made some kind of plastic end stop to prevent it from rotating quite that far but I didn't think of it now let me show you some of the input and output ports on the right hand side we have a USBC and an HDMI port unfortunately this USBC is power only I guess there must have been some sort of bandwidth limit or something but it's still useful for charging the HDMI port also has a slight limitation it can only do 4K at 30 HZ or 1080p at 60 but that's not really a big deal since I can just plug in an HDMI or display port adapter into one of the expansion card slots and get the full performance that way moving to the front we have two usba 3.0 slots these are the main ones I typically use then there's the exhaust vent where the air gets blown out by the CPU fan and of course you can see the main power switch here on the other side this little row of female header pins is connected to the Arduino I have it wired up so that it provides 5 volts ground two analog pins and six digital pins true it's very limited compared to even a standard Nano in terms of pins available but if you just need to do some quick testing on a simple circuit it saves you from having to dig another Arduino out of the dreaded parts bin just don't forget to leave the part of the code that handles the track ball controls in fact why not use the tracking data to control your project directly on the left side of the device there are two swappable expansion cards you can see that I currently have a USBC and an HDMI card in but framework makes a lot of different ones and I've even seen people in the community starting to make their own custom ones I did incorporate a hollowed out area that should have let me pull these out easily but they ended up fitting together more tightly than I thought so I do have to take the front plate off to change them but that's still not that hard to do it only requires unscrewing four bolts towards the top you can also see the controls for the LCD there's a button as well as rocker switch and a 3.5 mm headphone jack although that didn't seem to work with the USBC this board primarily serves to let you do things like change the input brightness contrast and other settings there's a setting called DC cr r that dramatically boosts the brightness but I noticed that the driver board does get pretty hot when it's enabled not sure if that's a big deal or not if we take a look under the screen you can see that everything is exposed this is because I was trying to keep it all as thin as possible but also wanted a flip up screen so I had to compromise somewhere one cool and unusual feature this thing has is additional video inputs I'm using one of them for the screen but you can plug stuff into the other ones and use this to for example set up another computer that doesn't have a monitor or use it to control Raspberry Pi if you want to test something there's no need to get out a whole monitor just plug it in and you're ready to go flipping the whole computer over it's basically just one big aluminum plate at the top are speaker slots since those are downward firing and would get pretty muffled without them these are the screws that hold them in and of course here's the air intake I made it a little bit oversized just to really ensure that there was tons of air flow there's no particular reason for this Grill design I just wanted to make it look cool you can also see the five larger holes where the M4 motherboard mounting screws are located one thing that's interesting is the added functionality of having a thick aluminum case the whole thing really does a nice job of absorbing and spreading out the heat from the processor on that subject let's talk about performance I got to say I'm fairly impressed this is an older board running an 11th gen i5 processor so it's hardly Cutting Edge but with the SSD and 16 gig of RAM it's pretty Snappy now the system does not have a dedicated graphics card and that's because I never intended this for gaming but you know I had to try it now can it run Doom obviously but can it run Doom 2016 surprisingly yes I've got it on low settings with a reduced render scale but I'm getting over 60 FPS what more do you want from a system like this actually it's kind of cool looking on this Ultra wide display I was also able to play OverWatch 2 albeit with some occasional lag spikes but I mean I want a few rounds so it's certainly playable now obviously you could use a newer board if you want even better performance I was just trying to save money as for the overall form fact factor in ergonomics I personally like it despite the limitations but I suppose it's a matter of opinion it's weird heavy and looks like it came out of a portal to some alternate timeline but I do genuinely enjoy using it for some odd reason and ultimately that's why I built this for fun because computers should be fun anyway I hope that you enjoyed this video if you do want to build something like this be sure to check the video description because I will leave links to the 3D files as well as the code and any other relevant information if you have any questions be sure to leave them in the comments thanks for watching and have a great day

Channel: Ben Makes Everything

Views: 772,388

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Id: qzEd50uzdF0

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023