Concept Project Keyputer reborn

GuilleAcoustic

Chief Procrastination Officer
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Jun 29, 2015
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This is a project I've had in mind for years, but the lack of affordable hardware put it on hold.

With the announcement of the Udoo x86, a 120x80mm x86 quad cores, the project is back on rails.





I'm a big fan of keyputers, started computing on a MO5, then moved to Atari and Amiga.

The idea is to bring this form factor back in my house, as a portable Linux laboratory computer.

Features:
  • Quad cores x86 (Atom X5, Celeron or Pentium)
  • Mechanical key switches
  • Expansion slot
  • 220mm x 310mm
Edit:

Here is my original work from a few years ago.

At this stage, I wanted to use System On Modules (SOM), coupling and ARM SOM with an FPGA one for specific on demand computation.

Chassis was a simple 3 folds sheet metal.




(Above chassis was an early design that ended up being too expansive to 3D print)
 
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Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
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May 9, 2015
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Oh I like ! Mechanical switches and x86 with expansion sounds really amazing !
 

GuilleAcoustic

Chief Procrastination Officer
Original poster
SFFn Staff
LOSIAS
Jun 29, 2015
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guilleacoustic.wordpress.com
Oh I like ! Mechanical switches and x86 with expansion sounds really amazing !

The Udoo offers an M.2 M key, an M.2 B key and a Sata. Found some e key to m-PCIe.

It also has an Intel Curie microcontroler, many possibilities :).

Edit: Showing the board performances...

Gaming

Windows 10

Linux
 
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GuilleAcoustic

Chief Procrastination Officer
Original poster
SFFn Staff
LOSIAS
Jun 29, 2015
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guilleacoustic.wordpress.com
Quick mockup in perspective, sorry for ths simplicity but I didn't fancy drawing the keycaps in perspective.





The breadboard / breakout expansion is to illustrate one of the possibilities.

The top plate acts as an heatspreader ans is made of aluminum.

Been looking at the LattePanda as an alternative board. This board sports an Atom X5 quad core, 2 or 4GB DDR3L and 32/64GB eMMC. It also has an Atmega32U4 onboard.





Also tried a logo design (GA design, bottom left of the perspective). I'm not talented for logo so I'd like to have your opinion and/or advise. Thanks :)
 
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BirdofPrey

Standards Guru
Sep 3, 2015
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Good choice, but I was alluding to the ZX Spectrum.

In other news do you plan on utilizing the arduino ports for expansion, and are you going to tinker with using any of the sensors?
 

Windfall

Shrink Ray Wielder
SFFn Staff
Nov 14, 2017
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could this be revisited with those asrock 5x5 boards with embedded ryzen cpus? this is SUPER cool!
 
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