Byran Huang's Impressive Anyon_e Laptop Is an Open Source Self-Build — Designed From the Ground Up

In what may go down as one of the most ambitious senior projects in history, Byran Huang has built a laptop — from, as much as is achievable for someone without ready access to semiconductor fabrication facilities, the ground up.

"The hardest class I've taken so far was quantum mechanics in my junior spring term. A few months before spending hours solving time-independent and dependent Schrödinger equations, I was on the squash bus (the sport, not the vegetable). My friend suggested I make a laptop for my senior project — and that was all," Huang recalls of the project's inspiration. "I came up with the name anyon_e in June, after I finished the quantum course. Making this laptop was hard. Mentally pressured with a deadline, and a constant inter-disciplinary challenge across electrical, software, and mechanical systems. Summing up everything I’ve ever done. It took up most of my mind from May until now."

As much of the laptop's hardware as possible was designed by hand and produced using remote manufacturing services — from the mainboard to a cooling system. which was CNC milled from a single block of copper. The laptop includes dual USB 3.1 Type-C ports, a single USB 2.0 Type-A port, a headphone jack, and a microSD Card slot accessible externally, while an M.2 E-key slot hosts an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi and Bluetooth dongle and an M.2 M-key slot a 2242-footprint Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid state drive.

While Huang designed the mainboard, a small corner was cut in the use of an off-the-shelf system-on-module — a nod to the reality that Huang had only a few months to complete the build. The FriendlyElec CM3588 is based, as the name suggests, around the Rockchip RK3588 — delivering four Arm Cortex-A76 and four high-efficiency Cortex-A55 cores, a Mali-G10 graphics processor, a neural coprocessor delivering a claimed six tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads, and support for an 8k-resolution display.

Rather than an 8k display, though, Huang chose to give the laptop a more reasonable 4k model: a 4k AMOLED measuring 13.3" on the diagonal. Not everything went smoothly during its integration, though. "Getting the display running on Linux meant finding system logs from Asus laptops that have this display, reverse-engineering the values, and tuning the power-on timings amongst other things just right," Huang explains. Elsewhere in the laptop is a power system running from an Espressif ESP32-S3 connected to a 60Wh lithium-ion battery pack, a commercial glass trackpad, and a custom mechanical keyboard that is wirelessly connected and can be removed from its magnetic mount on-demand.

"Being a mechanical keyboard addict with quite a few ZMK keyboards designed, I chose the Cherry MX ULP [Ultra Low Profile] mechanical switches for the best feel," Huang explains. "Of course, a battery and fully mechanical switches add a lot of height. I used a 1mm thin 200mAh battery and a custom battery protection board that sticks up between two rows of keys to cut down on ~1.6mm (PCB height). The [Nordic Semiconductor] nRF52840 SoC running ZMK Firmware is right underneath the spacebar. A sandwich of PLA and 6061 aluminum from Fabworks crammed everything under ~7mm."

Huang isn't the only person to build a custom laptop from the ground up and release its designs under an open source license, nor the only one to pick Rockchip's RK3588 to power it — the MNT Research Reform family, including the compact Pocket Reform and the recently-launched Reform Next stand out as prior art in the field — but the more the merrier, and there's no denying the resulting device impresses.

A full write-up is available on Huang's website, with links to KiCad project files for each component provided under the permissive MIT license.