Finally! A Raspberry Pi Linux Tablet that works!

i'm sure i'm clipping it's not an ipad it's a pie pad i'm holding the cutie pie the first really good raspberry pie tablet it isn't one of those giant chunkers with a raspberry pi 4 mounted inside this is an honest-to-goodness tablet computer built from the ground up to be well a tablet and it has all the basic components that make that possible an 8-inch multi-touch display a 5000 milliamp hour battery a few basic ports a microphone a rear-facing camera and the reason it can be made so thin and portable is this the raspberry pi compute module 4 that powers it and oh how about this cute carrying handle that doubles as a stand this thing has all the compute power of a pi 4 but it's squished down so it can fit into this really thin case the cutie pie is a crowdfunded open source hardware tablet and it runs linux along with a custom tablet interface that's i'm not going to lie pretty darn good for running on a raspberry pi but am i going to sell my ipad pro for this tablet not a chance but it's not meant to replace a modern high-end tablet let's dig into it it has a built-in handle that also doubles as a stand so you can put it on your desk this way or even in this mode although the angle on it is a little bit rough unless you have it up on a surface somewhere just because the viewing angles for the screen aren't amazing but speaking of that display it is a 12 1280 by 808 inch ips lcd another cool feature of this having the handle is these fun backgrounds like for instance the boombox so you could walk along on the street just like it's the 1980s how do you do fellow kids what but also if you flip it around on the back there is a 1080p 5 megapixel camera there's a speaker it's not the best speaker in the world it's a little bit quiet and there's also a microphone here now i've been trying to get the microphone and video camera to work together with something like zoom or google hangouts and i've had a little bit of trouble with that i'm calling this chipmunk mode so zoom is zoom is not something that uh i think that this tablet is great for i can't get the video to start either but uh i mean it sounds like we're animal crossing characters it's something for io there is a hdmi port here that you can plug into an external display or tv there's usbc power input and there is a usb type a port and this is usb 2.0 only every video i post about a raspberry pi project somebody's asking why isn't there usb 3 built in usb 3 on the raspberry pi 4 requires a special chip that's attached to the pcie bus usb 2 is built into the raspberry pi 4. so when you build something like this that uses a compute module inside it can't have usb 3 unless they add in another chip which adds cost and adds extra components on the board so that's why this is usb2 although this is already better than most other tablets in terms of io you can plug it into an external display without any adapter it weighs 564 grams which is just over a pound and for a point of comparison the ipad pro is about 470 grams it's a tiny bit heavier than that but it feels pretty good in the hand and there's a lot of different ways you can hold it the ui that comes with it is called the cutie pie shell and it has a lot of great little features for instance this little control center area up here it shows the battery life it shows the the volume wi-fi status and the time and there's some settings here this is all being expanded and probably will have some some different options in the shipping hardware but you can change your wi-fi network you can change the display's brightness this brightness selector leaves a little bit to be desired but it works it's functional and you can change the volume up here you can set orientation lock the actual changing of the orientation it takes takes a second or so sometimes especially if you have something like youtube open that uses a lot of processing power to lay out the page it works well and i haven't really had an issue with it with any of the pages i've been on or any of the sites i've been using so that's a nice feature to have and that's something that a lot of pi projects will fail with it also has the ability to have multiple browser tabs so i can tap that and then bring up a new tab and start a new new search or go to other websites you can also long hold and press on this and it will open up a terminal window which is really cool because now i have a full shell and i can do whatever i want i could ssh into other servers i could check files on the on the pi and there are some bugs with it though like you can see here i can't quite see the whole file unless i hide the keyboard these bugs are all being worked on i should note that this is pre-release firmware pre-release software and pre-release hardware and it's all being actively worked on and in fact some of the things that i found during during the course of making this video are being fixed already as time goes on i'd like to see more things like maybe some apps or other things a music player or or something else that would be fun or in the future if if you could integrate retropie with this you could have a retropie tab or something like that now there's also a bunch of settings you can set it in airplane mode to turn off wireless connectivity set your time zone the power mode kind of tweaks things so that it runs a little bit longer a little bit shorter depending on how much performance you need typically balance is fine in in my testing performance is better if you want to watch hd videos on youtube and things like that it has a built-in ad blocker which is helpful for a raspberry pi because a lot of ads on the web take a lot of resources so that's never fun to have to deal with you can also choose from a set of predefined wallpapers and add your own wallpapers as well so for instance they have some some fun other options so if i do this this is kind of like a modernist audio player look you can also boot this pi to the raspberry pi desktop instead of to this cutie pie shell which is helpful because there's a lot of things that you could do with raspberry pi that you might not want to be in the specialized ui to do and you can do everything you can even plug in a raspberry pi keyboard and mouse or any usb device for that matter and use them with this cutie pie so it's funny if you're in the tablet mode it actually locks the mouse into a vertical orientation but if you switch to desktop it actually switches to the correct orientation the power button on the side has a few different options just like an ipad if you hold it down for i think six seconds it will bring up the shutdown screen and this will look very familiar if you've ever used any apple device that powers off the device and i don't know if you can tell there it is the screen is not quite the same quality as you'd get on an expensive ipad or something with the oleophobic coatings there are fingerprints on it and i you have to clean it every and every now and then it's it's not something you notice that much unless you have a lot of glaring light but it is something that happens to turn it back on i hold it down for two seconds and then it boots up the pie straight into that cutie pie shell but as i said you can boot straight into pios too and this one since it's a test device actually boots into this factory testing mode and you can see that the the camera is working although the orientation of the camera is always a little funny like here it's rotated sideways if i rotate it then it rotates it upside down and then if i rotate it let's see this way then it is sideways again and if i rotate it this way then i don't know now it's right side up so i'm guessing that this is the way that that the camera is oriented for general use where it's on the back and the top left but it does work and the microphone and speakers both work fine the problem is that some of the software in that i'm using on linux doesn't seem to want to work correctly with it one thing a lot of people are wondering is how does youtube work on here you can see that just like any raspberry pi the user interface for sites that have more complex layouts isn't like 60 frames per second perfect refresh rate but that's to be expected it's a raspberry pi but youtube does work fine and i i can play any video i think they play in default at 480p and of course there's an ad and here's my video on building the raspberry pi 2 null 2 pi zero 2 null 2. and in this cutie pie shell i don't think that full screen actually works you have to be in the pi desktop for that to work but you can do theater mode and i can also go in and change the resolution now if i go up to 1080p at 60 frames per second it does get a little bit slower but again that's a raspberry pi thing that's not really limited to this cutie pie but if i switch it back to a lower resolution things play back pretty fine and on the screen it's a 720p screen so if you play 720p content that's really what it's made for so youtube works pretty well and just general web browsing if i go to my website things things work well i'll go to one of my blog posts and of course there's a youtube video that loads in but it works fine it's not going to be that same silky smoothness you'd get with an expensive tablet like an ipad but it works great and you can you can browse in either widescreen or in the tablet mode where you're holding it like this too so i'm i'm pleased with that it's it's a pretty bare bones web browser that they have set up in here but everything works well another thing that some people might consider using something like this for is a display for something like home assistant or in my case this is just running uh grafana on one of the raspberry pi's in my rack and this is monitoring my this office the carbon carbon dioxide levels the pm 2.5 and temperature and things over time so you can use this for monitoring dashboards and things like that or hmi human machine interfaces it's not meant for that purpose but it's it's something that you could do with it and it has a nice display and it has a good amount of battery life for that too also another important thing for any portable device is battery life this has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery and i i've run a few different tests and also cutiepie have run their own tests if you put the display at fifty percent brightness which is actually pretty dim that's about here uh it'll be okay if you were in in a dark room or something but at 50 brightness not running any video or not not playing any games or anything it lasts about eight and a half hours and i ran a test at 85 percent brightness which is here that's almost full brightness i i ran a test where again it was just sitting there on the desktop not doing anything not playing any videos and that got about three and a half hours so it's not like all-day battery life but it's a lot better than a lot of other portable pi projects i've used one difficulty is making accurate battery life prediction is very hard and companies like apple have the resources to get the right batteries and the right software and everything to make it very fine-tuned on here it has a battery life indicator but i've noticed sometimes it's a little bit flaky it'll say like seventy percent when it's fully charged or it'll say like five or ten percent and it'll actually be more like twenty percent but that's again something that they're working on because they have been calibrating their their battery life prediction but it is nice to have a battery life indicator and to be able to have it plug in and start charging and it shows in the menu that it's charging so that's really cool people have also asked about drawing on the tablet now this this doesn't have something like the apple pencil or anything like that but you can use your finger i'll do a hello and responsiveness is good it's again it's not going to be like if you're used to an ipad it's not going to be that same experience but the drawing does work well and if you have one of those little rubber tip pens or something you can draw with that the next thing i wanted to test too is whether this could be a fun portable gaming rig it has bluetooth so i have my bluetooth controller from 8bitdo here not sponsored just i like it you can pair this up with the cutie pie to play retro games there's probably a way to get retropie working on the default install or on another system but i actually downloaded a separate retropie image and i'm going to see if i can get it working on here so the cutie pie boots off of this micro sd card which is in a slot that's up on the top or bottom or left right i don't know what side you want to call this it includes a compute module for light which doesn't have built-in storage so that you can boot it off of a micro sd card which is nice so that you can switch out operating systems if you'd like so i'm going to switch to my retropie image and see what happens when i boot it up so i booted it up but the screen didn't come on and that's because this display requires a custom driver that's not part of the retropie image i actually spent a little time trying to get that display driver working on the retropie image but ran into a couple bugs so what i'm going to do instead is plug this into my monitor and see if i can get some retropie gaming going on that so let me grab my display connector plug it in whoa and there it is so the resolution on here is not quite correct so what i'm going to do is i'm going to log into the cutie pie from my other computer and reboot it and that should restart this and now it should pick up the right display resolution for this 1080p display and we'll see how it works all right so it looks like retropie is booting and there's emulation station and look at that now i could use a keyboard but i already actually paired this bluetooth controller i think i just started up and it should connect and there it is so it's actually working so i loaded up a few games on here let's try let's try nintendo 64. when i tested this on the pi zero 2 a lot of these games were a bit choppy they were playable but a bit choppy enough that i probably wouldn't want to play it too much on that little portable handheld we'll see how they run on here so the sound is coming out through the the speaker on here um there's actually one step that you might need to do because if you plug in an hdmi display it'll try to send the sound through that and if you have a monitor like mine that doesn't have a speaker you'll hear nothing so i had to actually make a little change to the a sound file the configuration in linux for the speaker and of course if you're using bluetooth headphones that's all going to be a little bit different already i can tell that all the animations are a lot smoother a lot nicer than the ones that we're playing on the pi zero two another thing i noticed so while this starts up the back of the cutie pie gets kind of hot especially in this area so i'm guessing that's where the raspberry pi is located we're gonna open it up and take a look at that in a minute i did run a stress test to see if this thermally throttles and it does after five or ten minutes of heavy use it throttles a little bit it doesn't throttle all the way down to like 800 megahertz or gigahertz or anything i think it goes from 1.5 to 1.2 gigahertz so most things will work fine but that is something to keep in mind with an all plastic enclosed case like this cooling is definitely going to be a little bit of an issue so let's see how this plays yeah this is this is much better much much better than the uh than the gameplay on the pi zero two of course that's due to the fact that this is using a compute module four which has a much much newer uh four core 64-bit processor inside the gameplay on these mario games is so fun whoever nintendo is in charge of super mario games don't fall off good save if you want to know more about mario you can watch video game donkey so retropie works pretty darn well in here it'd be really fun especially if i can get that screen working this would be a very fun portable gaming rig put a little controller like this in your bag and you can play pretty much any game from n64 and back now even ps1 is faster on this a lot faster than on the pi zero two i've noticed like textures are loading in right away it feels more like you're playing it on a console than you're playing it on a raspberry pi all right let's get out of here and move on to the next part i mentioned i wasn't going to replace my ipad with the cutie pie and there are a few reasons for that first i actually do a decent amount of typing with the on-screen keyboard on the ipad and i can nearly touch type on its display though not as fast as on a real keyboard the smaller 8 inch mini display on the cutie pie is a good size for casual use but i can't do more serious typing on it without a separate keyboard second while the cutie pie is polished for a pie tablet it's no ipad in fact it's not going to beat many of the android tablets in the same price range if you're talking about performance or polish at least not yet but it's still a nice device it's got the horsepower to do things like browse the web watch youtube and play retro games it could also be useful as a remote ssh terminal especially with an external keyboard you could also use it for maybe plugging in an rtl sdr for some portable radio hacking and one of the best things it's running linux under the hood and you could run other linux distros too like ubuntu or use other touch uis since all the drivers and software are open source and what's even more fun is the raspberry pi compute module 4 inside can be swapped out you could upgrade to 8 gigs ram if you want and if there's ever a compute model 5 you could hopefully swap that in for a major upgrade down the road speaking of swapping things out let's see how easy it is to get inside and make repairs so if i turn this over something that you don't see on pretty much any other tablet on the market all of the screws on the back are phillips head and what's even crazier is they're all number two phillips so you can take any old screwdriver that you might have in your house and chances are you're gonna have a number two phillips set on there so i'm gonna put this down and we're gonna open it up and see what's inside i actually emailed one of cutie pie's designers and in that one of those first email exchanges they actually mentioned right to repair so any group that's going to be using that as one of their first guiding principles i'm going to support them so it looks like there's two different screw sizes there's the uh the longer ones that go into the hinge and then the shorter ones that go into the back case all right so we got those off and it seems like this cover is retained somehow i could probably get in there with a fingernail yeah i can but if you want to be a little safer about it you can use a fancy guitar pick some people ask me why i have the guitar back here that's because if i ever need it i can have my repair picks right on the wall behind me you can get the guitar pick in between the seams here and lift up a little bit and should be able to start getting this to snap off okay there we go i'm feeling a little bit of retention here so there's something inside here and if i look closely it looks like it is the camera ribbon cable always use metal tools when you're working around a lithium ion battery or don't can't remember all right so the back cover is coming off and it looks like this is the speaker wire here now i'm sure somebody in the comments is going to mention this before they listen to this part of the video but this flat cable back here behind the battery is actually supposed to be on the top and i think in manufacturing they've changed that but again this is an earlier early prototype and so when they manufacture it they put the they put the flat cable on the wrong side of the battery but the battery on this one is soldered and it looks like there's a space for a connector but they didn't use a connector here it's actually soldered to the board which is good for long-term durability but that means if you want to disconnect the battery you're going to have to get out of soldering iron and probably use a little cap on or electrical tape to protect it this board being a prototype also has a tiny capacitor here that was bodged in to help with the compute module 4's power requirements and speaking of the compute module 4 there's a heat sink that's pretty thin it looks like it might be less than a millimeter with a little thermal pad on it that's all the thermal dissipation you're going to get here and since this is closed in there's not a lot of there's not a lot of opportunity to get that heat to spread out through the back of this plastic so that is one thing that will be limiting if you want to use this for high performance computing but really for tablets mostly it's for video watching and playing video games which won't really tax it too badly but this little motherboard is a custom motherboard designed by cutie pie that has all the i o that they need to make this tablet work so it has the the connector that goes to the screen and the touch controller it also has its own power management unit inside of it it actually runs its own little arm processor inside there just to control all the power states and and how to manage the battery life and things like that and there you can see the micro sd card reader if you're going to remove the board you definitely want to take that micro sd card out first and then the raspberry pi itself is right here looks like it's actually booting up so let's see it looks like it might actually be on so i'm going to make sure this is shut down by holding down the power button for 10 seconds okay so now it's definitely off and you can take the compute module out so i can do this and pop it right out of here and if there's ever a compute module 5 that's faster you should be able to just drop it in there or let's say you had a compute module that had emmc memory you could just take it and pop it in here and replace it so that's one cool thing about this even on a macbook pro you can't replace the ram but on here you could replace the whole compute module and double or triple your ram it comes with a pi compute module for light and the light one with wi-fi and bluetooth so it has the wireless capabilities but it doesn't have built-in storage but it does have a built-in network interface that's not used on here but i'll put that back on there and this is a 5 000 milliamp hour lipo battery as i said it lasts you know between three and eight hours depending on your usage pattern maybe a little bit less than that if you're using it really heavy doing gaming at full brightness but if you're just doing web browsing and things like that probably four to four to six hours would probably be my best guess it also has a itty bitty speaker here it's not the loudest speaker in the world it works if you're in a quiet room and it's not going to be high quality or anything but it works and then it has the camera module which is 1080p 5 megapixel camera that is decent quality it's about the same quality as you'd get from the pi cam v2 it's a very simple design and that's part of the reason they made it so thin and the hinge is is a pretty decent it feels good it's a solid hinge and having two screws all the way through it those deep screws is nice because that that makes it so the case doesn't creak or bend or anything like that another thing i like a lot about this design and the fact that this is all open source is i can get access to all the detailed schematics i can look on those and find where every connection goes on this board and even on the board itself these little itty bitty traces everything is labeled so well i love it when i see hardware like that it just makes it a pleasant experience for the hardware itself so kudos to cutie pie and since it wasn't manufactured that way i decided to just pull these cables on the top side to make this a bit easier because it is hard to get that camera in with the cable underneath the battery in an interview one of cutie pie's designers mentioned they wanted to build an inexpensive and truly portable linux tablet they first built around the compute module 3 which worked but as i noted in my testing last year it's really slow compared to the pi 4. so they switched to the compute module 4 which meant some parts had to be redesigned that added a little bit of time pressure to keep to their kickstarter fulfillment and understandably some people have been annoyed by the delays it seemed like there were two hard problems the team had to tackle to get this product out the door hardware design and the software to make it a usable tablet and both of those things are good but not perfect but one of the reasons i wanted to do this video was cutiepie's commitment to keeping the designs open source and easy to repair i mean number two philips how much easier can you get the design files are all freely available under the bsd license on github and even if you weren't going to build your own pcb and stamp out your own molds the fact that everything's open source means you can if you want see and modify the actual source code that makes this thing work in my early testing i found some power related bugs it turns out that's all controlled in this code which controls the board's power management inside an mcu this tiny stm32 chip and if i were so inclined i could even patch the code to fix it outside of hardware the worst aspect of most pi based tablets is the software and ui touch screen control is notoriously difficult to get right there's a blend of intuitive design good performance and stability that has to be met and of all the pi interfaces i've used cutiepie shell is the most intuitive and responsive i hope to see the software expanded a bit and to have more functionality things like keyboard layouts and multitouch are already good but they could be a lot better and i hope they do get better over time i asked about the shipping schedule and it turns out it's been a roller coaster from dealing with the pc parts shortage and the cm3 to cm4 swap to dealing with eu regulations that change the summer the cutie pie team's been fighting to cross the finish line and get units in people's hands it sounds like they're finally gonna ship either this month or next and from what i hear they're hoping to do another pre-order batch in the first quarter next year the cutie pie was made to be fun to use and easy to open up and repair it definitely delivers on that but while it's not going to compete with an ipad it's a great inexpensive linux tablet and it's a lot of fun to mess around with and if you think the cutie pie is cool you should subscribe right now a few other compute module projects i'm testing are even more fun just in a different way until next time i'm jeff gearling blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah she didn't like this part though where did you play them see this watch see and modify the actual go away no stop that means it doesn't have built-in sorry huh i wish there was one button like you could turn off notifications here and it would do everything reading things is hard

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 181,746

Keywords: raspberry pi, cutiepi, tablet, linux, computer, ubuntu, touch, touchscreen, os, pi os, debian, open source, oss, foss, software, shell, terminal, hacking, portable, fun, cute, cutie, pie, stand, handle, boom box, nostalgia, retropie, retro, gaming, browsing, desktop, remote, rtl-sdr, radio, battery, interface, design, kickstarter, success, campaign, shipping, hardware, oshw, pi

Id: t-ZQ9LRdXSk

Length: 26min 30sec (1590 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/lycan2005]

Looks good. Hopefully the UI can improve further in the future.

[u/spencerthayer]

Promising.

[u/IKnowWhoYouAreGuy]

Add a $100 screen to anything and now it's a cyberdeck. I plugged my phone into my tv, does that count?

[u/linuxjoy]

They are already sold out. Shame!

[u/Maora234]

Definitely signing up for when they're able to sell more next year. I've been meaning to get a tablet but never gotten around to it. Plus, being new to Raspberry Pi's in general, this seems like a good starting point.

[u/Mike_0804]

Cutiepi is cute just like ipad. But it doesn't support GPIO. The design is not very user-friendly for Raspberry pi users. I have one RasPad 3 which is thicker than Cutiepi because of embedded Raspberry pi 4B. But I think it suits me better.

[u/greeder59]

One step closer to my dream of a low cost Linux tablet. BTW: Yes, I know about the PineTab.