Here's the idea.

An extensible 3d printable laptop platform that is designed to accept any number of different motherboards and expansion cards.

I'm developing this idea but need input.

Here's my specification:

• 4:3 form factor
• 12-14 inch screen diagonal
• IPS screen
• Low profile mechanical switch keyboard
• Multi-touch trackpad with three discrete buttons
• Simple and robust 3D printable case with no snaps, just bolted together with metal studs
• Only just thick enough to potentially accept standard notebook optical drives
• Standardized mounting studs for motherboard in the center of the unit
• Expansion bays along sides and rear, motherboard expected to have slots available to accept expansion cards/drives
• Side expansion bays: high depth, one narrow and one wide per side; wide bays just large enough for standard notebook optical drive
• Rear expansion bays: low depth, intended mostly for I/O ports
• Battery goes in one or both of the wide side expansion bays
• Battery has integrated charge controller and power in jack; essentially the battery is the power management hardware
• Top-firing speakers

That's the basic platform. Everything else would be accomplished with the motherboard and expansion cards.

The motherboard is expected to take care of:

• Providing its own expansion bus to the expansion bays
• Providing the standardized power bus to the expansion bays for the batteries
• Providing audio path to speakers for expansion bays
• Connecting to the keyboard and trackpad
• Connecting to the LCD screen

The expansion bus could be anything. ISA, USB-C, PCIe, whatever community members come up with. The idea is that people would design various motherboards for the laptop and expansion cards to mate with them.

I have two ideas for motherboards so far:

1. Raspberry Pi board that accepts a Compute Module and presents USB-C to the expansion bays
2. x86 motherboard based on Vortex86 that presents ISA and PCI bus to expansion bays (the killer feature here would be coming up with an integrated scaling solution that makes low resolutions look consistently good on the LCD)

The main problems to solve in order to get the project off the ground would be:

• Designing the specification for the internal mounting, internal LCD/keyboard/trackpad interfaces, power bus, and batteries
• Designing the keyboard and trackpad
• Selecting a suitable 4:3 IPS LCD screen (I've been searching on panelook and they do exist in active production, though they seem to all be 1024x768 12.1 inch)
• Designing the 3D printable case elements and adapters/cradles for expansion cards/drives
• Selecting suitable speakers

What do you guys think? I'm no hardware wizard, but this seems like something that a niche community could form around.