This undertaking offers an entire new that means to DIY PC. We don’t understand how succesful you had been as a teen, however may you could have designed your personal Ryzen-based mini PC?
While making repairs to laptop computer internals, [Dominik Baroński] was busy taking notes. Trendy super-integrated laptop computer PCs have reached the purpose the place all of the features of a whole PC are embedded in a single chip. However it’s a giant, sophisticated chip with very particular feeding and care wants. When you’ve discovered what it wants, it ‘merely’ stays to produce it energy, hook up some DDR4 RAM, PCIe storage, and a few USB ports, and also you’re away. It sounds simple once you say it like that, however don’t underestimate how troublesome it’s to create such a board—and even to populate it by hand—but that’s exactly what [Dominik] has achieved.
The primary video is a time-lapse of the soldering course of, which isn’t very fascinating past the truth that they didn’t even waste time making a solder paste stencil and simply ran with handbook tinning and hot-air reflow. Nicely, we guess it really works, however you wouldn’t need to construct an entire batch this manner! Anyway, the second video, produced by YouTuber [Coleslav], is initially in Polish, however auto-dubbed to English for the remainder of us, and while a bit long-winded, does give a taste of how [Dominik] approached this undertaking. There are fairly just a few fascinating little technical particulars that [Coleslav] has teased out of [Dominik] when interviewing them for the video, resembling they observed that sure laptop computer producers had been reusing older PMU circuits designed to energy DDR2 RAMs by tricking the controller into working at decrease DDR4 voltages by tweaking resistor values, quite than specifying a ‘correct’ (i.e. costlier) DDR4 compliant gadget and redesigning the circuit. [Dominik] relied closely on the Saturn PCB toolkit for calculating differential pairs and different bodily PCB features to make it potential to design the circuit in KiCAD with simply six layers on a minuscule 100 mm x 100 mm define. Fairly a feat!
There have been points with utilizing sure chips that had been that can be purchased, however the documentation was leaked, so the vendor was possible not licensed. However the greatest downside is the BIOS, which was duplicated from the same laptop computer. [Dominik] hopes to search out assist to get coreboot working on this board, at which level the archaic keyboard and system controller (now referred to as the EC) could be junked in favor of a extra hacker-friendly STM32 setup.
No PCB footprint for the Ryzen chip was out there both. [Dominik] created it utilizing a Python script that learn the SVG view of the ball-out downloaded from the WikiChip web site. The pad positions had been identified, however the names nonetheless wanted to be entered manually. All 1140 of them. As soon as the mappings had been entered, schematic symbols could possibly be generated to finish the schematic. Subsequent, they created a 3D mannequin utilizing ChatGPT to jot down a Python script that learn within the ball positions and spat out an STL file that could possibly be molded into a whole footprint! [Dominik] has made a brief write-up on Hackaday.io with just a few pictures, and hopefully, extra particulars will seem within the coming months. We’ll be keeping track of this younger maker over the following few years; now we have a sense nice issues are coming.
While we’re with regards to constructing PCs, right here’s a DIY gaming laptop computer with a twist. On the different finish of the complexity scale, right here’s a neat DIY laptop constructed from scratch.
Due to [JM] for the tip!
