Live data from Hacker News

CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

cutiepi.io

131–140 of 176 posts

Re: CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy a 7.5” e-ink hat for the RPI for around 60$.

I can find some for $150-250. Can you share links to less expensive options?

Look at waveshare's website. Get one with a HAT if the description says it needed, and always check out the refresh rate, it varies wildly (from ~0.5 secs to 15+ secs)

I think they are Waveshare's supplier, you might even get cheaper/more specific stuff: https://www.good-display.com/product/6/

Re: CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my gosh. I've spent hours looking for something like this, and was never able to find one. Unfortunately they're out of stock right now, but I'll be ordering one as soon as I can. Thanks!

I once bought a small E-Paper display [1] for a Raspi, and was very disappointed with the refresh rate, it was useless. I wanted to use it to display room temperature and electrical information like home power consumption, solar panel power generation and stuff like that, and expected a refresh rate of around 1 update per second. Having it blink and do stuff for around 7 seconds just to redraw the next frame made me…

This apparently is about driving the ePaper correctly to produce intended image and not just using it as dumb framebuffer. The demo firmware for above mentioned M5Paper seems to have some support for intelligent driving of the display, sadly this is mostly not exposed to the (currently marked as alpha) MicroPython implementation for the device, where it only supports full (ie. "blinking") updates of rectangular regions.

Re: CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

#133
post #69
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but you can bet that 10 years later you won't be running obsolete software on it.

What makes you think CutiePi Shell will be maintained that long? Android has withstood the test of time, and although you'd need a custom mod to update your Nexus 7, chances are CutiePi won't live that long.

You don't need it to be maintained that long - you just need there to still be some support for Raspberry Pi's in Linux. E.g. I don't see a reason you couldn't run straight Raspbian on it.

Re: CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

#134
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been thinking about my kid’s first computer and something in this ballpark is interesting. More hackable than iPad, not quite the complexity of a laptop. Not sure this one is quite right’ especially compared to the Pi400, but nice to have the tablet form factor.

Pi400 is a fun thing. How much more powerful is the Pi400?

In theory the cm4 should match the 400: they're both based on the BCM2711 chip. There'll be differences in revision, though, and the 400 has a thumping great heatsink so it basically never throttles.

RAM-wise the CM4 they're using in the CutiePi has 2GB, while the 400 has 4GB.

Re: CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

#135
post #49

Two-hundred bucks is basically "impulse purchase" territory, but I'm nevertheless struggling to see the use case here. If you're into maker projects with Raspberry Pis, then I'm not sure what this does for you. It's a Pi already built into a consumer device. Not seemingly a platform for new maker projects. If you want a tablet with a Linux kernel buried in there somewhere, then there's probably a thousand Android opt…

Their software and hardware are open source. Far cry from alternative android tablets. Either way, building a tablet, even based on a raspberry pi, is no easy feat.

In reality, "open source" means next to nothing if you don't get any documentation... which Broadcom remains hesitant to provide.

At least for the Mediatek stuff there's some leaked datasheets and programming manuals as well as board layouts and such.

Re: CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

#137
post #54

I love this concept, I just really want one with an e-ink screen instead. I think there's a great niche for "embedded" devices around the home -- weather readout panels, lighting controls, music player, intercom, etc. -- but glowing rectangles mounted to the wall are just too... glowing. E-ink panels is where it's at, and a Raspberry Pi powering it is perfect. Unfortunately, the only real general-purpose e-ink tablet…

When do the Pixel Qi / One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) / XO-PC screen patents expire? :) Why not both? :) Update: oh holy shit, John Gilmore was a Pixel Qi investor, bought the patents to help the company close cleanly rather than go bankrupt, and licenses the patents with an generally-available Defensive Patent License[1]! What a story!!! Thanks John! Pixel Qi is from ~2010, so he's better than halved the time it took t…

License or not, if nobody bothers to make them it's still not going anywhere :'(

I'd love to have one too, I live in Spain and it would really help with outdoor use in the sun.

Re: CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

#139
post #106

I love this idea, but I would like something more ambitious. This is a interesting addition to the stable of Linux Tablets - with the Pine Tab that is one and a half? Thing is I am desperate to have a tablet with decent capabilities (and at about $500 price point) that is not a consumer device, and I need it nine months ago. Too late now - up to my eyebrows in Apple iPad nonsense. I have been working on a application…

> Thing is I am desperate to have a tablet with decent capabilities (and at about $500 price point) that is not a consumer device Reading your rant, I have no idea what your problem or requirements actually are. Why not buy $350 Surface Go tablets and put together a Linux image that runs on it?

Because: (a) The money spent on the OS (b) The bios is not open so cannot do that (c) impossible to gain the confidence of bosses doing this, it has to come from a manufacturer (d) the expense of doing that for each device is not trivial, if done even half way properly.

I do not think that is a very good suggestion!

Re: CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet

#140
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a sleep/wake button, but my Raspi 400 has no such feature, and googling about whether this can truly be done are inconclusive. 5h standby time suggests the sleep isn't a very deep one.

It might be hibernation, as in putting RAM on disk and shutting down.

Erm ... then the "standby time" would be forever.
Post reply on HN