[NTLK] The Incredible Shrinking Newt

[Igor Bertolucci]

Hello Everyone.



I recently tweeted about my experiment in trying to make the MessagePad 2000 as small as possible. For those who are not on Twitter and to add a little more detail I will write more about it here:



I recently purchased a MessagePad 2000 with a beat up case. I've had this idea for quite a while to strip down the casing and to use a more modern battery technology to make a MSP 2x000 as small as possible while using most of the original hardware.

So I de-soldered the the original battery connectors and replaced the power source with a LiPo 3.7V 2500mAh battery connected via an Adafruit Powerbooster Charger so that the voltage is boosted to 5.2V and so I can charge the battery via micro USB. You can see these two in the back side of the Newton. It's a WIP but everything is working so far.



The next step that I am hoping to do in the next week or so is to de-solder the original barrel power plug and the interconnect port and fill that space with a SparkFun FTDI Basic Breakout serial to mini USB board. This board will power the Powerbooster Charger when I connect a USB power source and will translate the USB signal to serial for communication/docking.



After that I will design and 3D print a casing to hold everything together.



On Twitter you can see some photos with size comparison to an unmodified Newton Messagepad 2100, a Toshiba Libretto 110CT, which was one of the smallest (if not the smallest) Windows 98 PCs of it's time (1998 - same time as the MessagePad 2000), and a GPD Win2, which is the smallest Windows 10 PC of today.



Cheers,

Igor