Project:Fuel cell laptop

Knowing if such a project is feasible is the matter of answering two questions:

• What maximum power can we expect of a reasonably sized and not ridiculously expensive fuel cell?
• What is the absolute minimum power consumption of something we can build and that qualifies as a modern laptop?

Fuel cell max power

Best candidate is probably direct methanol fuel celles (DMFC): high power density, no expensive catalysts, reliable technology, can drink vodka.

Problems: Safety hazards

• DMFC seem to require some heating to operate optimally (and ideally high pressure too, but most designs just don't use it and cope with reduced power)
• Methanol is toxic, and it can indeed catch fire

Power ? Size ? Price ? How to build ?

Previous work

• Interesting student project: [1]
• Nice discussion: http://www.instructables.com/answers/how-can-i-make-a-methanol-fuel-cell/

Ultra low consumption laptop

The minimum specs I want (Endy)

• 14' display
• Enough computing power, RAM and storage to run a recent Debian smoothly (don't care about the architecture as long as it is supported by debian)
• Wifi + Wired networking
• Standard I/O (nothing fancy, USB2, audio jacks and some external display)

Candidate parts

• Processor:
  • Intel Atom
  • AMD Geode
  • VIA has some nice things too I heard
  • ARM-based ? I'm clueless about those
• Motherboard: ?
  • Or may as well go for a SoC
• RAM: ? most suppliers do nice ultra-low voltage RAM now
• SSD: ?
• LCD panel
  • LED-backlit
  • OLED would be the must here but the price tag is not nice (and the decrease in power not so huge)
• Networking (if not included in the mobo/SoC)
• Graphics (same)

Need to evaluate the power requirements of all that