A working laptop built around a single 8-bit chip
It plays video, sound and a game on so little power it runs overnight without being measured.
A maker named Vladimir (Владимир Цибров) built a laptop-style device around a single 8-bit microcontroller. It plays video, plays sound, runs a game, and takes notes. Writing for Hackaday on October 4, 2026, Tyler August describes a machine whose brain is an Arduino-compatible board built on the ATmega2560 chip. That is the kind of simple, low-power part a person could keep running and repairing long after more complicated electronics quit.
"The heart of this machine was an Arduino-compatible AVR microcontroller board," August writes. Paired with it is an ST7920 monochrome LCD, 128 by 64 pixels. The software runs on FreeRTOS, an operating system that lets the device switch between applications and handle more than one task at once.
The multitasking is what makes it feel like a computer rather than a gadget. The post says it can play sound and video, switch between apps, run a game, and take notes. The video plays at 24 frames per second, in monochrome.
Hitting that speed was the hard part. "Getting 24 fps video playback was a challenge, especially with sound," August writes. To fit multimedia onto an 8-bit platform, the post says Vladimir wrote custom drivers and optimized his own code instead of leaning on the standard libraries most makers reach for.
The power story matters most to anyone thinking about running electronics off the grid. Vladimir is reported as saying he has not measured the actual power draw or runtime. What he has done is leave the device switched on overnight, several times, and each morning he found it still running.
The project is not finished in public yet. The code is awaiting review before release, and a demo video is posted on YouTube. What the build shows is how much useful computing one plain, cheap, low-power chip can still carry when someone bothers to push it.
Sources
- AVR Laptop Pushes the Limits of 8-Bit · Hackaday