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Mini laptop with a WM8650 chipset

The video about the tiny laptop


General

These days you can purchase a brand new laptop for less than 100,-€. Those devices are not suitable for entertainment, meaning playing computer games, watching videos and all those stuff requiring a brightly colored desktop (probably with 3D capabilities), because of their veeeery poor graphic performance. There is no need for that while working with the Linux commandline, hence those devices are very suitable for programming work and control engineering. While purchasing such a device you should have a look at laptops with android preinstalled, because they are equipped with a running Linux kernel and the suitable modules. Unfortunately none of the available laptops has a Linux system preinstalled (at least I don't know about one). Because of the fact that there is no BIOS installed at the main board, you have to use some tricks to be able to install another operating system at those computer. I have found a forum, telling how to do the conversion. The accordant link can be found here.
A big disadvantage of those cheap laptops is the non existent support for software packages and drivers. Meanwhile you can get better devices for less or the same money. A good deal is the Raspberry Pi.

Interior

Minbord Laptop
Figure 1:
The processor is a VIA CPU, type WonderMedia 8650, clocked with a frequency of 800MHz. 256MB of random access memory are installed, which is insufficient for most of the commercially available operating systems...
disassembled Mini-Laptop
Figure 2:
A headphone outlet, a microphone in, one Ethernet connector and three USB 2.0 jacks are available to connect external hardware. A 4GB SD-card is used as hard disc. Besides the operating system, many software tools are stored at those device and there is still disk space left. The display resolution is 800 to 480 pixel and it is even coated with a non-reflective layer, which I am missing at many expensive laptops. The keyboard is - let's say expedient, but included in the low price. The same goes for the touchpad. Two tiny loudspeaker don't really speak loud, but they can be used to play acoustic signals.
The energy is stored inside a rechargeable battery with a nominal voltage of 7.4V and a capacity of 1500mAh, which is sufficient for more than 2 hours of operating time.
A peak current of 670mA, acoording to a power consumption of 5W can be detected during the boot process. With the display brightness adjusted to the maximum value, 2.3W are drawn from the battery by the LED backlight. The integrated WLAN module consumes 740mW of electric power.

Advantages:

Mini-Laptop
Figure 3:
+ Completely equipped with keyboard, display and touchpad.
+ Integrated WLAN module.
+ Low energy consumption.

Examples of use

Flashing a microcontroller
Figure 4:
Programing and flashing micro controller.
Homemade plotter
Figure 5:
Plotter.
Motor control
Figure 6:
AUTO-mation.


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