Tired of The Man holding you down on the tablet front with his oppressive App Stores, his tyrannical carrier constraints, and other outrageous insults to your civil liberties? Well now you can break free of this stranglehold, thanks to a company called Liquidware and its open source, DIY tablet starter kit. The premise is simple:
Liquidware provides a touchscreen OLED display (4.3-inch, 480 x 272, resistive touch), the BeagleBoard guts (a single-board computer driven by a 720MHz ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP3530 CPU, with 2GB of NAND and an SD card slot), and the BeagleJuice battery module, along with an SD card pre-loaded with Angstrom Linux. You put all the pieces together and then just basically go nuts, designing your own application marketplace, infrastructure for direct-to-consumer video and audio sales, and a revolutionary and magical user interface that blurs the lines between waking life and a hallucinatory dream-state where anything is possible, and the only limitation is yourself. Check the Moscone Center's booking information below to see scheduling availability for your developer conference, and hit the source link to offer up your $393.61 to Liquidware.
posted June 18th 2010 2:29PM
That is a really low resolution screen 4.3" screen. Probably want to buy a better capacitive one online.
@Templarian Or a better tablet.
@Templarian when the kit comes out that allows for multi touch and stylus based input ill be loading EC7 onto it and just making my own damn courier like device
that little SD card looks like an SSD the way your showing it.
@Oldarney
That's what I thought.
When I read "2GB preloaded with Linux" I thought - well, it's pictured as 4GB!
@Oldarney It comes with a 4GB SSD. You can expand that via SD cards and the onboard USB port.
Screw driver included.
@kiwi32 But no graphics drivers included :-(
"and the only limitation is yourself." It always gets me, damn that limitation!
so much more expensive than those actual android tablet in ebay which is selling for a little over $100.
@htd android tablets don't have io pins sticking out ready to control.. well, anything from your cars injection to the vu meter made out of 1kw lights.
thats what a kit like this is useful for, embedded projects.
still a bit costly though.
@glassfin
No, they have USB ports for that.
@HKCally Exactly. You can interface USB to pin-level I/O for under $10 (that's what a USB to parallel cable is):
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&cp_id=10311&cs_id=1031104&p_id=6265&seq=1&format=2
You get at least 8 I/O pins that can be controlled:
http://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/cable/parallel.html
So, for $110 you get a much more powerful and generally useful base, fully assembled, with direct I/O pins accessible via a standards-based interface.
If your needs are simpler, you can go with Arduino which starts around $15. The BeagleBoard is priced for a decade ago; it no longer makes economic sense, even for prototyping.
Terrible hardware, but I love the concept.
I guess my Evo is considered a tablet for almost the same price.
That screen is fail
@DefPoet Epic fail
BeagleJuice BeagleJuice BeagleJuice!
hmm... still not here.
Why did this whole article sound sarcastic?
@Doc139115 Because its engadgets apple-paychecked way, thats why.
@Doc139115
Engadget is written by consumers who are afraid of things that don't come in sealed polycarbonate, metal, and glass enclosures apparently. I suppose they're like 4chan's /g/ board, afraid of gadgets they can't buy at Best Buy (or an Apple Store.)
@microlith
I'd say they're the exact opposite of /g/.
@microlith If you think we're so awful, why are you here commenting?
@Doc139115 For luls I think.
I loled, so there.
@shurcooL as did I
@Joshua Topolsky
Because the oft useless commentary is outweighed by the useful information. And I've hooked two Engadget editors today. Say hi to Chris for me.
Holy shit, I remember messing with these little beagleboards back in my college senior project. They are pretty amazing..
TechNexion offerings are more appealing and less expensive http://www.technexion.com/index.php/tao-devkits
@upnatom Agreed.
That's actually a really decent deal. $250, and it has wifi and audio support, unlike the BeagleBoard.
BeagleJuice! BeagleJuice! BeagleJuice !
*looks around expectantly*
That's 2 Gb of NAND, which is 256 MB.
BeagleBoards are pretty amazing, but if you're in the market for one, hold out for the BeagleBoard-xM that is coming out in the next few weeks. 1 Ghz CPU, twice the RAM, Ethernet and USB hub on board.
So basically the only thing you're doing yourself is assembling the hardware?
@UnixSystemsEngineer
Yeah, better to buy a decent spec tablet for less, strip it down and reassemble. You can put $100 in the trash and look at your tablet through your bad eye if you want the full effect.
How about a tablet conversion kit for existing netbook models? Includes 5 hour battery, custom shell and touchscreen overlay. Just remove the guts from your netbook, insert them into the shell and connect the cables.
@One Love
Do you even know how computers work?
@whiskers What kind of question is that? People have converted their Dell Mini 9s into tablets. No reason you couldn't design a conversion kit for a popular model.
Kinda ghetto the way he did it though:
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-hardware-upgrades/13639-dell-mini-9-tablet-project-complete-lots-pics.html
@whiskers
Apparently you don't.
@Ducman69
Thats a neat little project going there.
"a hallucinatory dream-state where anything is possible, and the only limitation is yourself"
You mean zombo.com?
@whiskers
I loaded that site in 2004. When I came to it was 2005.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Wow, this is apple's evil twin, or good twin. I with is had a bigger screen and I wish I knew how to code for it. I would have some fun.
But sheesh. Talk about the exact opposite of apple. So anyone know how to code this?
So close...
I'm totally with them up until I read 4.3" screen (that's not a tablet, that's an EVO!) and RESISTIVE. Booo!
The Beagleboard makes great (cheap) tablet guts, but that screen sucks, and barely qualifies as "tablet". Try doubling the size and resolution, and being capacitive, and then I'm totally sold and will buy one of these in a heartbeat.
Can we expect Liquidware products to evaporate and become vaporware?
@localhost Brilliant
@localhost Only when they become really hot. Judging from this one, that's not happening anytime soon.
resistive? booo!
It's actually 2 Giga*bits* which is 256MB, it has the same amount of SDRAM as well.
I think Josh knows this sucks, hence why its posted (and with nice spoonfulls of sarcasm).
But sorry bro, there is still an excellent argument for HP, Asus, and other big box manufacturers to release a netbook tablet that isn't just a locked down iPod Touch attached to a huge screen. =p
@Ducman69 The target audience for this device is much more technical that most of the people, and editors, here.
It's for people with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. I love my hobby electronics projects.
@MioTheGreat Fair enough, but it isn't going to touch a mass production model in price/performance for consumer adoption.