[SGVHAK] Open Hardware, Crowd Funded "Laptop", ARM with FPGA

[James McDuffie]

Braddock sent a link around previously about an open hardware laptop.
That same guy is now crowd funding his design for an open hardware
"laptop". Notice the quotes, because the base reward levels are not
laptops without you providing additional hardware.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3657

The core board is a 1.2GHz, Freescale quad-core ARM architecture
computer closely coupled with a Xilinx FPGA. If you look at the funding
levels, this is all you get at the $500 level. As you go up in funding
levels you can get a aluminum case, LCD, and at the whopping $5000 level
a "Heirloom Design" laptop made partially out of wood.

Even though these prices seem high (to me), everything that is offered
has the design files available for download. So theoretically one could
replicate the hardware. However, it seems that the CAD file format he
uses requires an expensive Windows only program. Also the FPGA
programming itself is not open source and requires proprietary software.
So there is a long ways to go before this is truly 100% open hardware in
my mind.