German IT news website Heise reports that Andrew “bunnie” Huang has successfully financed his open source Novena Computer hardware, although the crowdfunding campaign is still running until the end of this week.
Novena is an open source hardware of software platform for hackers who appreciate a development platform that’s as open as possible. Huang originally wanted to fulfil his own wish for a laptop specifically for hackers; due to heavy demand the hardware can be ordered via the crowdfunding project until the end of the week.
The motherboard is on its third revision although the essential performance characteristics have not changed. Freescale i.MX6 is used as the CPU; this has four Cortex-A9-cores with a frequency of 1.2 GHz. The Vivante GC2000 GPU is used for the graphics. The connections and specifications for the laptop are comparable with other netbooks and are on average as follows: up to 4 GB of RAM (1 SODIMM, DDR3-1066), SATA II interface, USB 2.0 interfaces, HDMI output and Mini-PCI Express. A dual channel LVDS LCD connector can supply a screen resolution of 2048 × 1536 pixels at 60 Hz. The exclusivity of such a “handmade” product is clearly reflected in the price. Huang has stated in the past that this is not a cheap PC system.
The Novena platform is available in 4 variants. The motherboard on its own costs US $500. The desktop version is available for US $1,195 and the laptop variant for US $1,995. In addition, the Heirloom version is a designer variant for lovers of handmade cases. The work of designer Kurt Mottweiler costs a hefty US $5,000 and this Novena variant comes with a hand-crafted wood and aluminium housing.
As far as the operating system is concerned, Huang is using Debian GNU/Linux.