Case mod

58 Articles

Making A Laptop With A Mechanical Keyboard

September 16, 2025 by 16 Comments

A laptop is one of the greatest tools at the disposal of a hacker. They come in all manner of shapes and sizes with all manner of features. But perhaps the greatest limit held by all laptops is their chiclet keyboard. While certainly serviceable, a proper mechanical keyboard will always reign supreme, which is why [flurples] built a laptop around a mechanical keyboard. 

Such a keyboard could not fit inside any normal laptop, so a custom machined case was in order. The starting point was a standard Framework Laptop 13. Its open source documentation certainly helped the project, but numerous parts such as the audio board and fingerprint sensor are not documented making for a long and tedious process. But the resulting machined aluminum case looks at least as good as a stock Framework chassis, all be it, quite a bit thicker.

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A New Screen Upgrade For The GBA

August 27, 2025 by 8 Comments

The Game Boy Advance (GBA) was released in 2001 to breathe some new life into the handheld market, and it did it with remarkable success. Unfortunately, the original models had a glaring problem: their unlit LCD screens could be very difficult to see. For that reason, console modders who work on these systems tend to improve the screen first like this project which brings a few other upgrades as well.

The fully open-source modification is called the Open AGB Display and brings an IPS display to the classic console. The new screen has 480×480 resolution which is slightly larger than the original resolution but handles upscaling with no noticeable artifacts and even supports adding some back in like scanlines and pixelation to keep the early 00s aesthetic. The build does require permanently modifying the case though, but for the original GBA we don’t see much downside. [Tobi] also goes through a ton of detail on how the mod works as well, for those who want to take a deep dive into the background theory.

There has been a lot of activity in the Game Boy Advance communities lately though as the hardware and software become more understood. If you don’t want to modify original hardware, want an upgraded experience, but still want to use the original game cartridges we might recommend something like the Game Bub instead.