Well the build for the tablet PC isn’t exactly going smoothly… I have had to source components from all over; and I really do mean all over. The Via Nano board came from San Jose CA, the laptop screen came from NYC, the RAM was ordered in locally, the compact flash HDD replacement came from Kent, and the touchscreen overlay and controller came from good old Radio Spares.

I actually got to a point where I could start testing the board and installing Ubuntu only to find out that the board is dead. Yup, the most expensive component that has travelled the furthest refuses to admit it has any RAM. Nice. The day I discovered this I also received the import duty letter from FedEx; just to pour salt in the wounds.

I am trying to squeeze all the components into a case just over 3cm thick which means having a custom heat sink made. I managed to call in a favour from an engineering firm to measure the contact surfaces for me (”is accurate to 1 micron OK?”) so I can get the design started at least. So just got to wait for a new board, source the stupidly hard to find connectors for the LVDS laptop panel, find an inverter, figure out power consumption, decide on the batteries, recharging and control circuitry… Walk in the park.

The TFT and touchscreen are just sex on legs though so I have to see this thing through now, not to mention that the last pay cheque basically got cashed in for all the components so far. Turing knows how much the heat sink is gonna set me back…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under geek, Table PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.