Sean Feeney
Architect of the digital age

DIY Wooden Laptop for $50

6 March 2007

(Slashdot/Engadget) - Chris Fenton has a dremel, a few slabs of bass wood, and some nifty programming skills, and he’ll be damned if he can’t build himself a $50 laptop. At least that’s the only way we can see anyone spending 4 months of their life building what would have been one mighty powerful machine - in 1974. Other than the impressively full-featured laptop keyboard (which we’re pretty sure he didn’t actually make himself), his project consists of a 20 x 4 character blue and white LCD display, some AA batteries, a wooden case (which hopefully won’t catch on fire), and a few low-end processing components to make sure the whole thing comes in under budget, like a PICAXE 18X Microcontroller and a whole 96 bytes of RAM to address (though have no worries, Chris is planning on boosting that to a spankin’ 8K before too long). The whole thing runs on Chris++, Chris’s homebrewed programming language, which means he only has himself to blame when it doesn’t run Doom.

Posted in stolen laptops, wood-based computers