Developers want to release open source tablet based on Raspberry Pi

A group of developers wants to release an open source tablet based on a Raspberry Pi. The CutiePi should be released at the end of this year, the makers say. The tablet will have an eight-inch display and a casing that can be completely printed with a 3D printer.

Unlike other Raspberry Pi tablets, the CutiePi is based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Model 3+ Lite, a smaller board with the same hardware support but without the connection ports. The makers behind the CutiePi have created their own version of the board with an on/off button and USB ports, as well as a gyroscope, a temperature sensor and an amplifier.

According to the makers, the tablet will receive a 4800mAh LiPo battery, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0. The tablet also has six gpio pins, in addition to a USB-a connection and a slot for a micro-SD card. The whole is 124x209x12mm in size and must weigh 350 grams. The screen of the tablet is an LCD display of eight inches, with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels. The device runs on a modified version of Raspbian, the default operating system for the Raspberry Pi.

The CutiePi will be an open source project according to the designers. This means that although users can buy a ready-made version, the community can also adapt everything to it. This makes the software publicly available, and users can create their own casings. Also, the motherboard schematics are made public. The makers say that the tablet’s motherboard is ready and that they have a working prototype. At the same time, the company says it is still working on the tablet shell, and that the specifications are not yet final. That is why they would not have set a price yet. It will likely be somewhere between $150 and $250.