The moment you’ve been expecting is here! The CutiePi tablet has been made available on Kickstarter, for $169 and up and the Raspberry Pi tablet is as new as it looks… old. It feels like it would be at home in the ’80s or maybe even in Steve Wozniak’s garage. We have all the details below.
The device is an 8 incher with a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution, a 5000 mAh battery and a carrying handle. The CutiePi is also modular, as it’s an open source device powered by the Rapberry Pi Compute Module+ Lite single board computer. It’s meant to run Linux-based software and its hardware and software are both open source. This means that anyone can download all the needed data and built and set up their own CutiePi slate. This also means that you can build your own CutiePi via a 3D printer.
If you’re too lazy for that or don’t have the time, you can just spend $169 to buy the finalized product. The Kickstarter campaign has started and you can reserve a device or just the components you need. The tablet measures 213 x 134 x 12 mm and the project is already getting plenty of funds. The goal is 35k dollars, which should be reached by August 14th. It’s already at 60k, so it’s clear that the device will get made. The products ship in November, when it sells for $229.
Early birds get the following offers:
- Super Early Bird reward – $169 (limited to 50 backers)
- Early Bird reward – $179 (limited to 150 backers)
- Kickstarter Special reward – $198 (no limit)
For these sums you get a tablet, microSD card with software preinstalled and cables. Backers can also order the PCB board and simply 3D print the case. That board offers USB-C and USB-A ports, 6 GPIO pins, a micro HDMI port, WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.0, as well as a gyroscope and other basic components. One $90 pledge gets you two CutiePi boards and cables. What makes the device tick is a 1.2 GHz Broadcom BCM2837 ARM Cortex A53 CPU and 1 GB of RAM.
