A bit of background

I somewhat recently got my hands on an old Thinkpad R61 (2007 is not that old sorry to all the boomers reading :P) and was very impressed by the build quality of this thing. The keyboard is chunky with a clunky thunk, the casing feels like it could withstand anything (to open it you need to slide a lock for petes sake) and it even comes with modem capabilities!! Only thing it lacked was a usable amount of memory, compatability with modern linux DEs and working battery. The latter being fixable and the former two limiting its usability.

What i really wanted to be able to do was upgrade the brains of this laptop to something modern, and turn it into a sleeper build.

Other work

A little bit of digging around i found this replacement motherboard by XY tech/Hope, but between spotty communication and project being completed/sold out this option was out of the window.

LattePanda enters the equation.

Around this time i came across Ben makes everything’s video Building a LattePanda Mu Cyberdeck, which introduced me to the LattePanda Mu, a very powerful compute module. Instanstly intrigued, i went to their website, where i found they were running a design challenge, and sponsoring projects with an evaluation kit and a PCB fab voucher. I signed up on the spot and within a couple of weeks had on my hands everything i needed to make exactly what i had dreamed of.

Where from here?

Well at the time of writing this im in the middle of uni exam season, so gotta get that outta the way. Im also thinking about features i want in this system, and how to work around the specs of the Mu. So far ive got these following features;

• Full featured USB-C (3.2 SuperSpeed, DisplayPort alt mode, Sinking capabilities to power & charge the laptop and ideally enough sourcing capabilites to be able to run my solding iron or other high power devices)
• A set of galvanically isolated USB ports
• Compatability with old peripherals (Keyboard, Touchpad, Original display)
• Adding to the previous point, ability to upgrade the display to a modern eDP panel
• Repurposing the Ultrabay (CD drive) to a PCie module slot, for future expansion ideas (SDR, storage, maybe even graphics card???)
• Some sort of serial or other port that will be handy in future embedded dev adventures
• And as a stretch goal i think i would like to make use of the docking capabilites