Hello all,
I have been looking for a laptop that can LIVE in extreme cold weather. Like northern Canada cold. about -30C -20F
There are Tough laptops but they are expensive.
I want to made a case that can hold a framework 13 that will be able to keep it alive in extreme cold, wind and snow. so water resistant is also important.
I am thinking that is 3d printed and filled with foam. maybe put in a heater to help it warm up before booting. Use a USB keyboard that can be used with gloves. And have 2 USB-C ports. Put glass over the screen to help keep the heat in. I have Thought about putting it into a Pelican case but those are really big and when you open it up to use the laptop it still needs extra insulation.
If anyone has thoughts ideas, links to cases for inspiration. CAD, Images,
Other than the cold, you also need to consider condensation / moisture control, material structural & thermal stability with repeated temperature changes to and from -30c, mechanical tolerance changes…
If you don’t mind 2nd hand units, 1185g7 fully rugged models from Dell can be had in the used market for under $2k CAD. Something to look into maybe, and call it a day. Unless you need bleeding edge / current gen compute capability.
The majorly cold sensitive parts coming to mind are the battery and the lcd display. The latter could be avoided by just using an oled display. As for the battery that may need some external heating to at least get initially going.
If it only has to be able to live in -30C temperatures you could probably delete the fan out of an fw 13 and seal off the ventilation which would take care of most of the condensation concerns. Would make it somewhat problematic to use indoors though.
As for external ports there would need to be some way to deal with condensation inside the ports and stuff.
I would recommend using a rugged laptop or at least sleeve/case plus semi-rugged laptop, instead of using a Framework laptop in cold, or heat up the laptop to above +15C. Opening the heater case to access the laptop may cause condensation due to large temperature exchange
I tested on ambient +15C performance mode using
s-tui, the power and CPU frequency went all over the place. in amdgpu_top its Throttle status showed flashing SPPT/FPPT (sorry I forgot to screenshot).Thus, even if you managed to keep the laptop positive celsius, the performance will still be less stable, the actual performance according to the workload, non-cpu tasks may work normally.
Pending edit: any ideas of testing combined/multitasking such as disk I/O, RAM, WiFi, etc at lower temperatures?