Saturday 24 December 2011

I think I might build my own tablet

So the raspberry pi looks like its gonna ship in January. Can't wait have so many great ideas of what to do with them. My favorite Idea is to make my own tablet.

I already have usb bluetooth and wifi dongles lying around so thats the connectivity taken care of. I'll need a Screen that there are linux drivers for. Although I'd like to find something cheaper than the one I linked too so if anyone has any ideas let me know. Maybe something that actually uses the RCA or HDI connectors on the raspberry pi. Then I'll get one of the kits for the old triple e's to turn them into a touch screen. The EEE's all shipped with Xandros at the start so I presume there are linux drivers for the kits out there somewhere. The last thing I'll need is some batteries I figure some of those solar powered lithium ion batteries used for back up charging phones and tablets would do. Probably try to use two, one sending power to the raspberry pi and the other to the monitor. For the case I'm think balsa wood and mechano but we will see how serious I get about this when I actually get a raspberry pi.

Software wise I'm going to be going with some linux distro obviously. Really which ever one has the best support for the raspberry pi is probably going to be my first choice. Then I'm going to either use kde's new plasma active interface as a desktop environment or hildon, which is the awesome interface used in maemo on the nokia n series Internet tablets. As for any other operating systems I might put on it, unless there is a really convincing argument for it android can suck it although I might try webOS after they open source it.

The most important thing about this entire design(if you could even call it that) is that I wont have to solder much because I can do many things but give me a soldering iron and I'm only going to get the job done after 3rd degree burns. Still can't wait till the raspberry pi comes out and I get a new toy to play with.

4 comments:

  1. This is a usb screen, I'd suggest that you take advantage of the RP's analog or digital output to drive the screen. There are quite a variety of 12V 7 inch screens made for use in a car, I'm hoping to use one of those.

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  2. I've actually recently done this with a netbook. I think the raspberry pi runs linux, which might be a problem - for the screen i got at least (from 'Visual Touch World') I could register clicks, but it was convinced I was constantly clicking on and off. Not reccommended, at least, not that combination of OS and screen. I ended up using Windows 8, which worked very well, but a raspberry pi wouldn't be able to run it.

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  3. @Phaedrus : As I said above I'll probably be looking for something cheaper that uses the hdmi or rca outputs available
    @Bermuda Cake: Wouldn't dream of infecting my raspberry with windows even if it were possible but I've seen people do similar things to this before on linux its just a matter of the right driver and version of x.org

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