The VAIO P has attracted several serious hardware projects, and it would be wasteful to rediscover every connector and constraint from scratch. This page collects the work that directly informs our CM5 rebuild.
It is a working comparison, not a ranking. Each project solves a different part of the same awkward little computer.
Project Koyomi
Project Koyomi is the most direct reference for our display path. It drives the Sony VAIO P LCD from Raspberry Pi DPI through an LVDS transmitter board.
That solves one of our hardest interfaces and gives us something more useful than a finished photo: open KiCad files, revisions, reports, renders, and fabrication notes that can be checked together.
See the VAIO P LCD board guide for how Koyomi fits into the CM5 rebuild.
CRImier’s VAIO P work
CRImier’s reverse-engineering work is valuable for replacement-mainboard thinking. It treats the VAIO P as a complete hardware platform with electrical and mechanical constraints, rather than an empty shell waiting for another computer.
That is close to our approach. The CM5 carrier has to respect the chassis, side openings, keyboard, display, battery bay, and Sony’s internal stacking.
Omniwing’s rebuild
Omniwing’s rebuild matters for a different reason: it reached a finished machine. Even with a different internal approach, a completed build reveals the cable-routing and packaging compromises that only appear when the shell has to close.
What to compare
The interesting question is not simply which compute module each builder chose. We want to compare how every project handled the same constraints:
- display interface
- keyboard input
- pointing device
- side ports
- battery and charging
- storage
- thermal path
- enclosure fit
- documentation quality
- open-source reproducibility
Fabplane angle
For our own work, we want the evidence close to the hardware: KiCad source, measurements, photos, release notes, design checks, and an honest status for each board.
This page still needs permission-cleared images or repository renders from the projects being compared. Until we have those, using unrelated teardown photos would make the article look fuller but explain less.