Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Hacks and Modifications: Everex Cloudbook


I have been asked to talk about hacks and mods possible with Everex Cloudbook.. So here you are..

Continue reading..

Please remember: the second you start opening your new device, you have to understand that your device may end as spare parts for your next device.. you have to accept that before starting.

Memory

Upgrade to 1gb. It does not support 2Gb

Internal USB

This is the first thing you should do if you are thinking adding extra features. You should start looking for one now, so you have it stripped when your Cloudbook arrives. Look for small one.
As there is no evidence of internal usb pins, you need to route your hub from wifi, bluetooth or webcam cables. You need to route power from mainboard.

Storage

There are plenty of bigger drives, upgrade to bigger one if you need the storage.
If you want it to be fast and durable, go for SSD. They cost a lot but if your main goal is to use it while mobile, it's the best choice.

There is also CF to ZIF adapters, which you may want to use if you don't want to spend too much for real SSD. If you choose this way, remember that normal flash wears in OS use. You should commit all rewrites to RAM disk


Wifi

Buy new wifi antenna for it. Current antenna is inside the base unit so it is not that good for signal strength. Place new one inside the screen frame.


3G HSDPA/EVDO

There is plenty of room inside the screen frame for usb modems. You could even have one of the small ones there without taking the modem apart.

GPS

Again, a lot of space inside the screen frame, small GPS module would fit easily.


Touch screen panel

It's easy to ad, it makes your screen more durable and it's very nice to use. Do it!

Screen

As Cloudbooks uses LVDS, it is relatively easy to find screen for it. If you need higher resolution, you should look for Kohjinsa/Samsung 7 inch screens. You would need some expertise to swap it, but it is fully possible.

There are also bigger screens, but you would need to make new "face plate" for it. If you really want to go big, try to find 8.9 inch LVDS LED backlighted screen. Toshiba and other use them. 8.9" 1280 x 768 would be nice! Remember first check the real specs, you want to see the pinouts before buying. You could also use older non LED screens, but they would eat your battery faster and you would need to find place for the inverter.


Operation system

There are plenty of Linux flavors to choose, but you should check the availability of drivers first. XP installation is easy. I'd buy a external cd drive to make it the easiest way. Vista will also run on Cloudbook, but 1Gb is a must for it. MAC OSX doesn't like VIA. I haven't heard anyone been able to make it work on this platform.. This is what OSX says about VIA:



Are you going to do any?

You could always just wait for their next models.
Paul C. Kim, Director of Marketing at Everex, has unvailed their plans:

SSD drives ( when they get cheaper )
Touch screen ( developer version coming )
Feminine Colors ( pink? )
Larger screens ( 9 inch, and even 22 inch ??? )


Cloudbook at FCC






Related News:

13 comments:

Michael Boman said...

* Memory
Yes, definitively going to upgrade to 1 Go. Too bad it can’t handle more.
* Internal USB
Considering the amount of mods I think this mod needs to be seriously considered.
* Storage
I think I’ll just stick with the 30 Go it comes with for the time being.
* Wifi
Depending on software/hardware requirements I may change or add wifi modules. Looking at the screen shot the wife module seems to be powered by the RTL8187L chipset - which has limited support in some of the software I am planning to use, but works well for normal connectivity. I will definitively look at the antenna issue no matter what.
* 3G HSDPA/EVDO
Can’t live without it, so definitively needs to add that in.
* GPS
A nice add-on that will be seriously considered.
* Touch screen panel
Sound like a good idea to me. Depending how much I have to pay for it, and how much the other mods will set me back, I may or may not go and do it.
* Screen
A 7″ screen with higher resolution is a possibility, but won’t change the screen size - I am not to be trusted with a dremel tool.
* Operation system
As mentioned earlier I will install a plain Ubuntu on the machine.

Ahmed said...

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Michael Boman said...

jkk wrote: As there is no evidence of internal usb pins, you need to route your hub from wifi, bluetooth or webcam cables. You need to route power from mainboard.

Looking at the FCC pictures wouldn't it be easiest to add the USB hub to the wifi connector? The wifi connector is a standard USB plug so you could supposedly do it even without soldering, if there is enough space to go around.

JKK said...

yep, you could use the usb plug, but if you need more power than one usb port can give, you need to get it from mainboard anyway.

Anonymous said...

Is that orange text next to the webcam? I thought they were white?

Michael Boman said...

Smeette said: Is that orange text next to the webcam? I thought

If you look at the press photo over at the Everex press site you see that the text is white.

Considering the low quality of the FCC pictures in the first place I wouldn't be surprised if they compressed the colors out of the images too.

Lapidary Dreams said...

Can't wait to put soldering a screwdriver & a soldering iron to this thing!

Touchscreen will be done right after/during the RAM upgrade. Will probably install XP as well.

GPS
Bluetooth
Internal USB Definitely!

Anonymous said...

The mods I would like are:
Upgrade to 2 Gig, switching the OS to Fedora, adding any sort of internal GPS system

Anonymous said...

For those interested, there's a CloudBook mod site at http://www.cloudbooklounge.com

Michael Boman said...

Smeette said: Is that orange text next to the webcam? I thought they were white?

After looking more closely at the XS20 the text is white when not in use, but are lit up with an red LED (which makes it glow orange when passing through the white label) when in use. Hence the labels are sometimes white and sometimes orange.

Unknown said...

4gb is supported actually by the chipset in the nanobook/cloudbook. im using 2gb of ddr2 533mhz centon memory in my cloudbook right now. its kickass and its twice as efficient as the eee and way faster at least twice as fast, considering the nanobook boots off of a conventional hard drive it boots very fast using the latest in linux kernels 2.6.24.3 , the ultimate hacking machine? 25gb/s encryption/decryption capable, V4 "FSB" 533MB/s bandwidth, all this with 5 hours of life, my god i haven't seen a machine this efficient ever. 2gb modules are 35 dollars a single piece from newegg, when the 4gb's modules are cheap ill go 4gb nanobook!! and ill add a 100gb hard drive or SSD.

Anonymous said...
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Unknown said...

Post is old but i want to try...
Arty can you tell me which model have you?
Mine is Belinea s.book1, it accept 2gb ram but it recognize it as 1 Gb even bios than os...
Can you send your bios to me?
Thanks

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