Librem 14 Progress – Hardware Development

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Nicole Faerber

Sourceress

Latest posts by Nicole Faerber (see all)

• Unleashing the Librem 14 - July 6, 2022
• Librem 14 Rave - April 8, 2021
• Librem 14: Adding Librem EC, Freed Embedded Controller Firmware - February 22, 2021

About a month ago we approved the schematics for our Librem 14 main board, which is a fully custom Purism design. After that the schematics, which describe which electronic components are connected to which and how, needs to be turned in to a PCB design. This is a complicated and time-consuming process. We are happy to announce that this has been completed and first PCBs are being made and assembled as we speak. This is a great step forward since it will also allow us to to get started with something we have not talked about that much yet…

Freeing the Embedded Controller

With the Librem 14 we will work on freeing the embedded controller (EC) firmware! We put some special features into the hardware design which will get enabled by our own free custom EC firmware. First of all this will allow customized control of the system fan. We also intend to expose an interface into Linux so that Linux applications will be able to control the fan. Second we will expose as much of the battery charging into Linux userspace as we can in order to give better control of charging and discharging of the battery. This can be used to extend the battery life at the expense of some battery run time or to manually kick off a full charge cycle because, for instance, you know you will be on the road and need as full a battery as possible. What we will also expose into Linux userspace is an interface to control the keyboard backlight brightness. We have attached the keyboard backlight to a PWM output so you will be able to adjust the brightness with fine granularity, only as bright as you need it.

Notification LEDs

And finally we have added a feature that is quite unique. Basically any phone these days has an LED indicator to indicate events, like incoming message, email, calendar notifications etc. We also implemented this in the Librem 5 where we have an RGB LED. All three colors can be individually controlled in brightness by a PWM so almost all colors in many brightness levels can be created, as well as of course a variety of blinking and glowing patterns.

You know that we talk about convergence a lot. Our goal is to provide the same environment as much as possible across all of our products, especially the Librem 5 phone and the Librem laptops. We already use pretty much the same software base and are working to make this close to 100% the same. This now also goes into hardware because we have implemented this notification LED into the Librem 14 too! This is a full color LED with a PWM controlled interface exposed into Linux user space and you can expect PureOS to use it in the same way as we use it in the Librem 5!

With the first hardware now being produced we can finally kick off this low level firmware development and integration into PureOS. This is very exciting and we are so much looking forward to seeing this work. We will of course keep you posted!

Our Most Flexible Librem Laptop Yet

The Librem 14 is our most powerful, most flexible and most secure laptop yet. If you want free software, flexible interfaces, and cutting-edge, powerful hardware, the Librem 14 is the best (some would say the only) choice. Be sure to pre-order the Librem 14 before our $200 off early bird discount expires!