To everybody, and maybe to nobody at all.
I’ve always held a strong belief that a single person can achieve accomplishments beyond imagination given the time and resources. Most importantly, the person has a passion and dedication to reach that goal. It is what I’ve spent the past three years working on at MUREX Robotics. The ultimate goal for me is to try and make a meaningful impact on something — anything — that pushes the boundary on what’s possible. I think making things open source is the most straightforward way of showing the world what is possible with nothing more than the above.
A little backstory…
I came up with this idea on a three hour long bus ride with the squash team. Bored out of our mind, we started talking about possible senior projects for next year. Perhaps by coincidence (or not), most of the squash team is also on the underwater robotics team. Somebody made a wild suggestion to make a laptop that runs off solar panels or plants to me. Although those ideas sound fantastic, the “laptop” part of it stuck most.
Right-to-repair movements are going strong, but it is difficult to make change in such a large industry. I wanted to put my own contributions to this incredibly important cause that might shape the consumer electronics industry for decades.
In an era of growing complexity and integration of personal computer systems, could you still make a “homebrew” computer? Perhaps most importantly, would it be something that you could realistically use day-to-day? An area that is incredibly difficult to tackle is the problem of “integration”. Analogy time: just like there’s a seeming infinite way of tacking an integral (integration by parts or partial fractions, variable/trigonometric substitution, and the worst of all, evaluation by recognition) there’s no magical panacea for hardware/software/electrical integration. I think it’s what makes Apple products so popular and why people buy Metcal soldering irons for nearly a thousand bucks.
After all that, what is the mission?
An anyon is a two-dimensional quantum particle that is neither (or both) bosonic nor fermionic. In the same way bosons collapse together in the lowest energy state, the laptop is compact and tightly integrated. However, it’s distinct and each “energy level” is identifiable, like fermions (please forgive me for this loose quantum comparison).
anyon_e is a laptop for anyone. Using it feels sleek, polished, and like a flagship device from a major company. Meanwhile there are no secrets under the hood. anyon_e is a mission in and of itself — to show that it is possible for anyone can make a nice, solid laptop. The power is in your hands.
// Byran Huang ‘25