Project to revive a dead macbook with completely custom internals!

[T0mn0mn0m]

I've been itching to do a hack and mod type of hardware project for a while. And I also happened to need a small light weight laptop with good battery life and specs for just internet browsing and video watching.

Digging through my junk box I found the carcass of an oldish mac book. It had a screen a keyboard and a chassis, but that's about it. I've ordered a bunch of stuff which should be arriving over the next few days and wanted a place to share my progress and post some pictures and videos of the build as it progresses. I'm a big fan of the EEVblog and read the forum regularly, so I thought I'd make an account and start a build thread.

My basic outline for the project is:

* Use the original screen and casing
* Have good battery life (6 hours  )
* Be light enough to comfortably sit on my lap, unlike my current gaming laptop
* Have a built in headphone amplifier for powering my favorite headphones
* Be powerful enough to stream 1080p video and handle web browsing
* Have reasonably powerful good sounding speakers for watching movies

I've chosen to use the motherboard from an acer aspire ZG5 as they are fairly cheap, intel atom powered and have a reasonably powerful graphics processor. The battery will be a 4000Mah 11.1v Li-po battery, the speakers are 2 8ohm 3w speakers at the sides and 2 4ohm 5w speakers at the front/middle, the amplifier will be 2 6watt 2 channel class D modules. the ECU will be an arduino micro and will control charging, volume, screen brightness, temperature monitoring and powering on and off.

I had the macbook shell, screen, li-po and arduino micro already. And the speakers, motherboard, thermistors, amplifier ICs and various wires and connectors have been purchased and will be arriving in the next few days.

This may seem a bit of a silly project, but I'm an EE student, and I love building something instead of buying it if I can. I had the need for such a laptop, and some of the parts so it was the perfect project.

It's dark at the moment so I can't take any good pictures of my progress so far, but I will update with some pictures tomorrow. I also have a better camera on it's way for some video of the build in progress.

Step one is making a 13.3" CCFL backlit pannel work with a motherboard designed for a 10" LED backlit screen. I have done a lot of research into the LVDS protocol and I believe it should be possible. If it turns out not to be, I will have to purchase an LVDS to VGA converter and get video over VGA.

First video: building the screen and battery



My camera ran out of memory just before I could show the transplanted battery board working, but it did work fine. So I'll show you that at the start of the next video.

[TheBorg]

Subscribed! Been waiting to see for one of these types of projects for a long while. Best of luck with the project! I'm guessing it's something like a powerbook titanium or a pre-unibody macbook pro...

[T0mn0mn0m]

First video up! Working on the second one.

[scientist]

You're going to need a whole lot more than an Arduino Micro.

[amyk]

You should install OS X on it when you're done.

[theatrus]

If you wanted something out there, you could sub in a RPi for the main board.

[calexanian]

If you wanted something out there, you could sub in a RPi for the main board.

Is there a RPi Linux distro that can play videos?? I have been trying (not very hard) to get full blown puppy Linux to run on raspberry pi. That would be fun. It needs more memory than pi has to be ram resident and be able to do much of anything else.

[janoc]

You mean these?

http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Raspberry_Pi

[calexanian]

Eh, not really.