Hello, so here is to make me an experience in computer science and to have fun a little, I would like to make my ideal computer. but as I am not very competent in computer science to create one from scratch, I would like to take as a base the mnt reform and customize it in such a way to make “my own version”. I have downloaded all the plans present on this link , but I confess I have trouble finding my way around. I would like to know if someone could help me find my way around or give me documents or advice that could help me. thank you and long live free software!
I would like to apologize for the mistakes I made. I am French so my English may not be very good…
I think you need to determine first what exactly you want to modify to make it “your own version”. There are two main components in MNT reform laptop - chassis and SoM.
Chassis is a custom built open hardware and it makes display controller (and display itself), input controllers (kbd and pointer devices), power/system controller, sound codec (adc/dac), usb hub and perephery interconnection (m2/pcie ports). Plus mechanical design of course.
SoM is (in a default configuration) 3d party sourced Nitrogen8M module hosting CPU/GPU, perephery controller (spi, i2c, i2s, pcie, smb, etc), video controller (hdmi/dsi/dp), etc.
So now you have 3 possibilities:
design your own SoM (actually a single board computer) - there are at least 3 SoMs already in-flight so you can get your inspiration. ALternatively you can come up with SoM adapter like RPi CM4.
customize chassis - it is OHW so you can keep the original SoM and focus on customizing perephery instead. Probably that will be easier to start with.
use reform as reference model and inspiration and design your own laptop from scratch, eg without SODIMM SoM but instead with BGA scoket for selected SoC (f.i. x86 compatible).
OMG! i hadn’t answered… sorry for the wait… and thanks for your answer, personally it’s the open-source part that i’d like to change, the battery for example, is some connectivity for example. and if it’s possible, i’d like to change the keyboard. in fact, i’d like to dwell on the side of the personification of the box.