No posts for a month! WHAT!

Thanks to reader Nathan for the post title ;)

hmm..yes...no posts...the replacement parts I bought off ebay still sit in the box and I haven't progressed any further. The dremel is still sitting on the bench, plugged in and hasn't moved in a month. Scraps of plastic still lie where they fell. The corpse of a once beautiful laptop rests under a pile of papers, bluetooth keyboards and the hat I wore three weeks ago...

There are a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that the place I have a day job re-structured and I had to re-apply for my job. This took up a bunch of time and some emotional effort to get past and there wasn't the 'free' time to go play in the garage by myself (although doing as much would have been good therapy). The other reason is that I have been away on and off doing other things and I was hoping to have had this thing finished already but I hit a few stumbling blocks and I lost the momentum.

Never mind...I have used the time to have a good long think about the case design and after seeing this nice unit I'm going to try for something that isn't as cramped (but not made of wood). What I will probably end up doing is having the battery located under the keyboard/trackpad and shifting the internals rearward a couple of centimetres. This means the pitch of the keyboard won't be as pronounced as it is at the moment and some other components won't be forced into positions of potential failure which is another issue I had (the ribbon cables and connectors are't exactly built for multiple bends/insertions and I broke a couple...hence buying spare parts)

Anyway... hopefully I'll have something a bit more substantial to show in a short while.

Still here

Still here.

Haven't managed to work on anything for the past week. Been away and will be busy this weekend shooting a wedding (doing that other thing I do).

Trying to re-think the whole battery thing. Might need to do some minor modification of the casing to make it fit right but the danger there is accidentally puncturing one of the lithium cells and we don't want that.

Replacement parts and Amiga's

Well my replacement to case turned up today...that gives me spares of quite a few bits which will be good.

I've also picked up a narrow heatsink for the CPU/GPU to help dissipate the heat somewhat. Should be able to finish this little project up next week.

All this (plus some comments from readers) has re-lit the spark inside me that I reserve for the Commodore Amiga. I fired up WinUAE for the first time in a long while....I still suck at Shadow of the Beast. Part of me will always wonder what would have happened if Commodore didn't go bankrupt....would we be using Amiga desktop machines or would they have been just another also-ran like Be or Acorn? Who knows. All I can say is that the Amiga is one thing from my childhood that I can look back on and they still look cool :)

So I made a little image that merges the two together :)

Hey...it boots

A few people have asked for a video of it booting.

So here it is....booting ;)

Setbacks and boot videos.

As I might have mentioned earlier, I had a litle setback where the power LED unit wasn't working. Since then the power button decided to be sporadic and because theres sone little resistor thing somewhere in the mix, kernel_task keeps hogging all the CPU.

I have narrowed down the source of the problem though. There is a narrow distribution board that forms the junction between the keyboard, trackpad, power LED/IR receiver and also has some IC's on it that probably interpret the goings on and whatnot. Anyway, all this connects to the motherboard via a single ribbon cable. Now, everything works but only if I hold the cable in a certain way. When I let go everything stops working. This leads me to believe that there is damage either in the cable or the connector it connects to. Either way, not good.

To that end I'm ordering a replacement top case which includes all those components plus a bit more for about $70 delivered (used condition - new they are over $200). This will give me some spares for other components which is a good thing anyway :). Anyway, this means that things will be on hiatus until the replacement parts arrive.

I do have a boot video but it's with the top off and with me holding the data cable the right way to get the power butting working (holding things correctly and Apple products...hmmm). Anyway, I'll post it up if there's interest but really its only purpose would be to show that it starts up....and it's always been able to do that since day one. The point of all this was to cram a working computer int a keyboard.

One final note, I've re-attached the left hand side, mounted the power button and cut a rebate for the battery to sit in. Once the spare parts arrive the MacBook Air Project will be pretty much complete :)

I saw that Engaget article about the guy that wired up the trackpad to the 5V USB power. Might be able to incorporate some of this...but only if it can be done cleanly. I'd like to keep the keyboard and trackpad unmodified if possible.