geerlingguy and simonw really amaze me at how well and consistently they cover their respective spaces of interest. Great content, easy to read, and thorough! I'm sure there are others doing deep reporting like this on their own subjects. I'd love to read them too.
Jean-Louis Gassée's Monday Notes about tech and Apple. He's been in the business since the 60's, worked at Apple in the 80's, founded BeOS: https://mondaynote.com/
Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing. He's an engineer at Microsoft that has been blogging about maintaining legacy systems, Windows and MS-DOS for over 2 decades. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
Hackaday is a good blog too, there's many authors so it can be hit or miss but it's full of curious folks. https://hackaday.com/
where is the grift from him? he's not a salesman pushing a particular product but is talking about his experience with them. That's a really unkind and unfair thing to say about him.
He's a salesman pushing an entire industry who regularly receives special treatment and access from LLM vendors. The fact that he's open about getting these favors and subtle enough to sprinkle his salesmanship with a thin veneer of skepticism and plausible deniability doesn't make it any less of a grift.
So it could be possible to make a small portable screen device with this, or maybe not because (I think) the RPI is not optimized to work on a battery.
I would prefer a touchscreen with it.
I am not talking about a smartphone, because smartphones are often more powerful, more expensive. I would just prefer a device to do simple computing, with full access to the OS.
Smartphones tend to have android and powerful hardware, and a 4G or 5G antenna. I would just be happy with wifi and enough power to run some C or python code.
I am just curious what is the cheapest screen device that is possible to make with this, as long as it has wifi, a touch screen and be completely open. So far RPI is nice, but it's not really what I want.
You know the fun thing is, something like the Allwinner A133 - which is one of the most popular SOCs in lower-end tablets today - is like $5, or $3 in quantity.
It turns out it's actually not as hard as you'd expect to whip together your own board with one of those + LPDDR4 RAM + eMMC storage + fixings, and get yourself something like what you're talking about for... I dunno, sub $50? Maybe even sub $20 depending on how much RAM you put on it and what other capabilities you give it.
I'm in the middle of designing just such a board right now. Totally recommend taking a stab at it if you have any EE chops at all (or want to learn!)
Interesting. I'm currently having great fun learning systems programming on the Allwinner A64, and never considered the option of building a board with one, assuming they are still available. Are you documentating your project somewhere?
Lets just go with $50 and $20. If you're looking at that on top of the cost of a raspberry pi, comparing that to a super low-end Android phone, used, for something like $80-$100, is that really the way to go? The OS is different but termux has enough features, especially after rooting, that you can probably run whatever you're shooting for. Of course as a hobby, the parts that you find fun don't have to be the parts that I, or anyone else finds fun, so don't take this as me pissing in your cereal, it's more like there's the milk part and the cornflake part and so different strokes for different folks.
The "Cheap Yellow Display" was one of my favorite discoveries this year, it's now just my default choice for any micro-controller based project with a small display most of the time.
Castellations also enable use in a "burning fixture" like the below. The fixture has bent pins that hold the PCB physically and connect electrically to the PCB's leads.
Would love to see someone design a PLCC or IC Socket that would let you slide one of these in (like those old sockets they had in Macs for optional FPU chips).
"But unlike all the other Compute Modules, the CM0 has castellated edges like a Pico. That way, a company integrating this into their product can just pick and place it and solder it onto their main PCB, instead of working with more delicate board-to-board connectors."
But wasn't the board-to-board slide-in connection the whole point with other CM models?
From my discussions with Raspberry Pi, and with a few companies who integrated CM4/5 into their products, the board to board connectors were a massive pain to automate in a production line (not necessarily soldering the connectors, but in inserting Compute Modules.
It's surprising how good human fingers can be at getting the alignment, the push, and the slight 'pop' and the feedback required to know when it's seated properly.
That, mixed with requiring extra standoffs and screws to secure the CM to boards for any kind of vibration/mobile use cases probably informed the decision to go to castellated / solder-on.
It's not as friendly for quick swaps or upgrades, but it also reduces the total board height when it's all put together.
These use a very old and SoC and only 512MB of LPDDR2.
Using this for a tablet would be a very disappointing and slow experience. There are many better SoCs to use. If someone was set on using a Raspberry Pi, the full size compute modules would be a much better choice.
These are for embedding in very simple devices. You wouldn’t want to use it for anything like web browsing or trying to run a modern GUI app.
Thanks, yeah I understand their poor performance and energy efficiency for use in a tablet for content consumption or gaming.
And I am guessing that a part of the reason for a lack of any such RaspPi tablets is that marketing such a tablet would come with the need to negatively differentiate it from any similarly priced android tablet.
However I can think of many use cases, mainly for folks in the maker space, that are not content consumption or gaming or long battery life. I am thinking of dashboards or smart home control panels.
Right now I have a few raspi4s mounted on the back of an official touchscreen encased in an adjustable plastic stand. Been working great for years, but the size is clunky and processing power is more than what I need it for, which is just displaying a web page with some information and buttons.
Would love a thin display to mount on a wall near a door or have others lying flat on a table next to a beside or couch. Basically always plugged in but with an included battery for the odd moment when I need to carry it somewhere.
So many other uses i could think of.
Ive looked at Amazon Fire tablets, but the locked-down android and really android of any kind is just not something I am interested in.
Ive seen raspberry pis used for just about everything else but not this
I just want affordable, linux-powered displays in a slim tablet form factor.
Performance and battery life are not a priority for my use case
Unfortunately I feel anything sold as a tablet comes with the assumption that it needs to compete with an iPad and be used for content consumption and gaming.
Ive seen raspberry pi kits sold that do just about everything else but this.
Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing. He's an engineer at Microsoft that has been blogging about maintaining legacy systems, Windows and MS-DOS for over 2 decades. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
Hackaday is a good blog too, there's many authors so it can be hit or miss but it's full of curious folks. https://hackaday.com/
"Mao bless capitalism"
I would prefer a touchscreen with it.
I am not talking about a smartphone, because smartphones are often more powerful, more expensive. I would just prefer a device to do simple computing, with full access to the OS.
Smartphones tend to have android and powerful hardware, and a 4G or 5G antenna. I would just be happy with wifi and enough power to run some C or python code.
I am just curious what is the cheapest screen device that is possible to make with this, as long as it has wifi, a touch screen and be completely open. So far RPI is nice, but it's not really what I want.
It turns out it's actually not as hard as you'd expect to whip together your own board with one of those + LPDDR4 RAM + eMMC storage + fixings, and get yourself something like what you're talking about for... I dunno, sub $50? Maybe even sub $20 depending on how much RAM you put on it and what other capabilities you give it.
I'm in the middle of designing just such a board right now. Totally recommend taking a stab at it if you have any EE chops at all (or want to learn!)
It has a display, WiFi, Bluetooth and you can write whatever software you want for it.
It’s based on an ESP32, which is a microcontroller not a full computer like a raspberry pi
Sure makes it look like a stamp though… ;-)
https://www.amazon.com/DIYmall-ESP32-WROOM-32-Programming-Fi...
But wasn't the board-to-board slide-in connection the whole point with other CM models?
It's surprising how good human fingers can be at getting the alignment, the push, and the slight 'pop' and the feedback required to know when it's seated properly.
That, mixed with requiring extra standoffs and screws to secure the CM to boards for any kind of vibration/mobile use cases probably informed the decision to go to castellated / solder-on.
It's not as friendly for quick swaps or upgrades, but it also reduces the total board height when it's all put together.
Using this for a tablet would be a very disappointing and slow experience. There are many better SoCs to use. If someone was set on using a Raspberry Pi, the full size compute modules would be a much better choice.
These are for embedding in very simple devices. You wouldn’t want to use it for anything like web browsing or trying to run a modern GUI app.
And I am guessing that a part of the reason for a lack of any such RaspPi tablets is that marketing such a tablet would come with the need to negatively differentiate it from any similarly priced android tablet.
However I can think of many use cases, mainly for folks in the maker space, that are not content consumption or gaming or long battery life. I am thinking of dashboards or smart home control panels.
Right now I have a few raspi4s mounted on the back of an official touchscreen encased in an adjustable plastic stand. Been working great for years, but the size is clunky and processing power is more than what I need it for, which is just displaying a web page with some information and buttons.
Would love a thin display to mount on a wall near a door or have others lying flat on a table next to a beside or couch. Basically always plugged in but with an included battery for the odd moment when I need to carry it somewhere.
So many other uses i could think of.
Ive looked at Amazon Fire tablets, but the locked-down android and really android of any kind is just not something I am interested in.
Ive seen raspberry pis used for just about everything else but not this
I just want affordable, linux-powered displays in a slim tablet form factor. Performance and battery life are not a priority for my use case
Unfortunately I feel anything sold as a tablet comes with the assumption that it needs to compete with an iPad and be used for content consumption and gaming.
Ive seen raspberry pi kits sold that do just about everything else but this.