Description
Halfway through my college degree, my Laptop stopped working, not wanting to charge anymore. After learning that repairing it would cost almost half of the initial cost, i decided to go another route. building my own small form factor PC, which allowed me to bring my desktop PC to school, since all the rooms at school had second screens. But I wanted to push it even further.
This custom made laptop was designed and build over about 1 month in my spare time. I looked into how i should position the parts to reduce noise and not impact cooling too much. combine this with reclaiming parts from the old laptop, like the screen and hard drive, as well as order special hardware, like a Display driver and a Micro PSU, i was able to successfully build it.
So far it has gone through one redesign, improving on the thermals (moved from air to water cooled), adding in a HDMI switch, and i started testing with integrating a Nintendo Switch dock, to allow me to play switch games on a bigger screen everywhere i go.
The current plans to improve on is adding in a battery, so that i can use it anywhere, and a way to fully integrate the Nintendo Switch dock.
info
CPU: i5 7600
GPU: GTX 1080 3GB
PSU: HDPLEX 400W
STORAGE: 2,25 TB over 2 HDDs and a SSD
RAM: 8 GB DDR4
MISC: Wireless keyboard, fingerprint sensor, Corsair H60, a lot of wires, Nintendo Switch Dock
LEARNING ACHIEVEMENTS
“How hard can it be”
I often decide to pick up random projects under the notion of “how hard can it be”. Learning to work with version new programs like Illustrator and SolidWorks, as well as diving deeper on which computer components i need to make this work. this taught me to appreciate how much work goes into designing the components of a normal laptop.
Noise vs Thermals
One of the bigger points was how I'm going to cool desktop components in a small form factor. Choosing the places of air vents without making it so loud that people around me can’t work anymore. where the hot components aren’t placed so that your wrists burn when you’re trying to type and how all this would fit into something that i can easily put in my backpack.
Making it better
I would not say that it was the best choice I ever made. The laptop is about 6cm high, a lot heavier and some of the corners i forgot to sand making it difficult to pick up. But with having a custom case, it allowed me to add more custom features, like a fingerprint sensor, allowing be to login quickly, or the HDMI switch, allowing me to have multiple inputs to my laptops screen, paving the way for integrating the Nintendo Switch Dock. as well as the wireless keyboard, which means i can connect my pc to any large screen and still control it from far away. working on this project has shown me the value of working on projects that might not be vauble in terms of market competitive, but have a lot of aspects that i can learn from.