The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024–2025
anyon_e: a high-schooler builds a premium open-source laptop from scratch
Byran Huang designed every part of anyon_e — custom motherboard, keyboard, trackpad, CNC case — to prove open hardware can look like a flagship.
Byran Huang (anyon_e)
What it had to solve
Byran Huang, a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, saw laptops as a forced choice: open and repairable machines were visibly homemade, while sleek integrated machines were sealed. For his 2024–25 senior project he decided to build the counterexample — a laptop that was both fully open and indistinguishable from a premium consumer product.
How it works
Byran Huang, a high-school senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, spent roughly six months engineering a laptop from scratch for his 2024–25 senior project. The result, anyon_e, was a complete machine — a custom RK3588/CM3588-based motherboard, embedded controller, battery, keyboard, trackpad, display and chassis — rather than a repackaging of off-the-shelf laptop parts.
The design goal was to disprove the choice he saw in the market: open and repairable laptops looked homemade, while sleek integrated laptops were closed. anyon_e pairs an open-source design with premium details — a wireless mechanical keyboard, a glass-topped multi-touch trackpad, a 13.3-inch 4K AMOLED screen and a bead-blasted, matte-black anodized CNC aluminum case — so a non-technical observer would read it as a normal high-end laptop.
He released the design openly on GitHub and documented the build, then launched it on Hacker News in January 2025. The post reached the front page with roughly 3,200 points and more than 300 comments; readers asked to buy the machine and debated how fully open it really was, and the author said he had set the design up so it could be produced at semi-small scale.
Why it lands
- Building the whole machine made the argument concrete: a premium, open laptop exists because one person made it, not because it was claimed to be possible.
- Choosing a flagship look — thin aluminum, glass trackpad, 4K OLED — attacked the real barrier, since the market's objection was that open hardware looks DIY.
- A complete documented build turned a student project into a reference others can copy, which is how open hardware gains credibility.
- The name and mission ('attempt the impossible') framed the work as a proof, giving the launch a thesis the discussion could engage with.
What it did
The launch reached the top of Hacker News with about 3,200 points and 300-plus comments in a day, and the discussion turned on what 'open' should mean and whether anyone would buy such a machine; the author said the design was arranged so it could be manufactured at semi-small scale.
What you can take
To overturn an accepted trade-off, ship the artifact that disproves it: one documented, premium-looking open laptop answered the 'repairable means ugly' argument in hardware instead of debate.
Since then
After the January 2025 launch, anyon_e stayed on GitHub as an open reference, and Byran said he spent the following weeks documenting the build as thoroughly as he could. He had geared the design toward semi-small-scale manufacturing, though he could not produce units himself. The Hacker News discussion compared it with commercial open laptops like the MNT Reform Next and pressed on what 'open' covered; the author conceded that the RK3588 system-on-module was a chip he could not redesign on that timescale, which framed how far one person's 'from scratch' can go.
Sources
- Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch
- byrantech/laptop: anyon_e, a highly integrated, high end, open source laptop
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