Home Brew Hardware

Does anyone build their own anymore? At a soldering iron or WireWrap? level, not a putting-a-MotherBoard?-into-a-case type thing.

I have a good deal of solder jumping my SCSI hard drives. Does that count? -- MatthewTheobalds

I designed a computer for a science fair once. Didn't win, though -- I didn't have time to finish the software. -- DanielKnapp

If you really want to HomeBrewHardware see FpgaCpu for making your own cpus with a FieldProgrammableGateArray. -- SeanJensenGrey

Surely you mean "If you want to cheat at making HomeBrewHardware..."? I can't see many folk being able to mask and dope a wafer in their kitchen. 8-(

At work, I often take a soldering iron to small embedded systems. At home, I'm getting a workbench set up to handle some small projects I've been meaning to do for years. "Simply" plug a PIC chip into a solderless breadboard and hook it up to some LEDs and a few other things. Does that count? -- DavidCary

I've been wanting to try to build my own laptop for a while now, but where do you start. I have ideas for the case, display, etc. But, I would need a custom motherboard, and I'm too cheap to pay someone to do it for me. Plus, even a jury rigged way to do the SMD soldering would be pretty complicated. -- um45k777@yahoo.com