The Open Source Olimex TERES-I Laptop Is Now Available for Purchase

Many of our readers probably have experience building their own desktop computers, but DIY laptops have remained elusive. While desktop PC hardware is mostly modular and hacker-friendly, laptops have never really had that benefit because of their compact nature. But, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a demand for an open source DIY laptop that you can build yourself, and now Olimex is ready to fulfill that demand.

Olimex, a Bulgarian tech company, is known for producing open source embedded products aimed at hackers and makers. Now they’re answering the call for a laptop with open source hardware with their just-announced TERES-I laptop. Because the hardware itself is open source, CAD design files are freely available for every part — including the body of the laptop and all of the PCBs.

Most people, however, will want to purchase the complete kit, which costs €240 (currently about $284). The kit, which you assemble yourself, includes everything you need to build the laptop. The specs are fairly modest, as it’s not designed to be a powerhouse. It has an A64 ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, 16GB flash storage, and an ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU. The screen is an 11.6” 1366x768 LCD, and WiFi and Bluetooth are built in.

With the 9,500 mAh battery, the whole thing only weighs about 2.2lbs. It comes with Ubuntu installed, along with a handful of different popular programs. As it’s designed specifically for hackers, the I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO pins will all be accessible, and an FPGA module will even be available soon. If you’re looking for an open source, hacker-friendly, DIY laptop, then you finally have a good option in the the Olimex TERES-I.