Here's a work in progress, I bought a few broken Acer laptops to help me with my daughter's laptop mod: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=166119 and after a bit of tinkering managed to make a working one out of the rest of the bits. I fancied making a media playing machine, but I also wanted it to be able to knock up a quick letter without finding the keyboard down the back of the sofa.... I also wanted it to sound good, as well as looking cool so out came my dodgy sketchup skills to plan a scratch built aluminium and perspex case to hold the laptop motherboard and screen as well as a 4" subwoofer and amp. The construction has to be very solid to give a flex free base to the speaker box, so for the verticals in the build I would use 8mm aluminium. The construction is basically 4mm acrylic sandwiched between 1mm CNC'd ally, which will naturally be lit from inside , the monitor will have my logo cut out of the ally and backlit macbook style, and there will be a window behind the keyboard to view the sub box, which I have used speaker design software to produce bass down to 42hz The name 'flaptop' comes from the idea that the screen will be removable and reversible, after which you can stand the computer on its back and it will just look like a monitor from the front... Here are some early sketchup plans... Steve
Some build up pics.. Sorry about the crappy quality of the images, I'll try and at least correct the colour when I get a minute... Dissasembled test Motherboard top Motherboard bottom Illuminated keyboard dismantled I had 3 sheets of acrylic cut to size, here is a test fit of the motherboard to plan the cutting.. Planning the logo cutout for the back of the monitor Starting the cut (laser cutting quote £65!) Cut out and tested with an LED behind the acrylic Cutting the keyboard and touchpad holes Test fit Cutting the 8mm Aluminium (lots of lube needed!) This pic shows the first ally sidepiece in position, the baseplate and the bottom of the motherboard plate, you can also see the internal construction of the bandpass speaker box. Notice I changed the design from the sketchup plan to just use one speaker which actually gave me better figures... Here is shown the top plate with the keyboard cutouts Detail of the subwoofer compartment lined with mirror acrylic sheet, the lines you can see are the edges of carpet tape which is what I used to fix the sandwich of ally/acrylic/ally together. Base coming together Mmm shiny! Test pic with a couple of CCFL tubes from an old fan Detail of CNC'd cutout for the keyboard CNC cutting was expensive, but was worth it looking at this.. The inevitable 'bluff it together for a preview' shot And detail of the speaker box.. ....And that's as far as I've got for now, I have put it to one side whilst I finish off my car PC, but after the amount of work I've done so far, don't worry I'll be back on this! Steve
