"Mao bless capitalism"
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/
The LLM stuff feels minor in comparison, even if it may be what HN knows him for. It's certainly not the same level of achievement as your average bargain bin AI rambler in your LinkedIn feed.
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!)
In addition to all the other suggestions, you might look at PINE64's offerings. Maybe one of their tablets, their PinePhone, or one of their SBCs or SOCs.
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
If all the device needs to be is a dumb terminal locked to displaying a web page, it's really hard to beat the value proposition of modding a dirt cheap Amazon/Android tablet. Most Pi home-built solutions with an addon touchscreen, battery etc will be less elegant solutions that cost more a lot of the time.
Locking a cheap android tablet to a single page is super common in home-brew home automation builds etc, even in builds where Pis are used. You can trivially turn a great many Amazon tablets into home automation dash/remotes/web kiosks.
> but the locked-down android and really android of any kind is just not something I am interested in.
When all you want is the browser, Android is as good a place to start as virtually any other on a device like 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.