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Comment by Lerc

5 days ago

I have been looking at things like this and wondered if there is scope for an open source project to design boards that provide power and data access to a variety of common old laptop panels (and keyboard+touchpads) along with a holder for a compute module. Then let people lay out the location of their USB ports etc. in the shape of the motherboard of their old laptop and get one run off by JLCPCB or PCBWay

I have several old laptops that still have good screens and keyboards, It would be nice to repurpose some of them. They are certainly large enough to house a compute module with plenty of extras.

I'd definitely be interested in a project like that, but I think customizing a PCB layout and sending it off for manufacturing would be too much for many people that would otherwise be interested in it. I think a project like that would gain more traction if it focused on designing high quality boards for a few popular laptop models (MacBooks or ThinkPads IMO) and making those available via on demand manufacturing and/or crowdsourcing a bulk run.