A challenger appears: Taiwanese devs' answer to Gemini PDA wraps a Raspberry Pi in a tablet A team of Taiwanese engineers is planning to release an eight-inch tablet based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+. The CutiePi, as it's called, has a MIPI DSI (Display Serial Interface) 1,280x800 pixel touch-enabled display, a gyroscope and temperature sensor, 4,800mAh battery, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a single USB port, an …
Most modern scopes use an ascii protocol more or less swiped from tektronix. I have code talking to and controlling some GW Instek scopes here - and it seems to be the same protocol (it's fairly dumb...) used by other brands as well. It will easily run on a pi (I do so here).
You might get some good out of looking at the stuff at this link (my site) http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=989&start=0&hilit=scope+control+code
Or in general, downloading this and that programming manual for the various brands - most have them online, but it takes some fishing...in the GW Instek case it's done by series, so looking for your model doesn't find it...
If that's not enough, my email is also my handle here at gmail.com
Good luck! You're not going to find anything free out of the can, nor fully as you want and pre packaged. Some assembly required (unless you're simply wealthy enough to buy a Tek and their software).
I bet it's not as good as a Z88 in terms of battery life or typing accuracy... That thing was way ahead of its time in many ways. I personally would be happy to sacrifice screen size for a real keyboard - I just won't buy a device of this type (including phones) that doesn't have physical buttons.
Might be hard to find a graphical screen with the dimensions to fit in a Z88 (or the Tandy 100), but the Compute Module supports 2 DSI ports so with two smaller screens (5" or so?) side by side you could have sufficient screen real estate.
You would also want to fit a trackpoint, touchpad or trackball somewhere.
The Gemini's form factor is a winner: it does fit into a pocket and a real keyboard is a real advantage. Planet is struggling with the software but the package all in all is compelling. All the Pi's struggle with being limited to USB 2's meagre bandwidth. In many situations this doesn't seem like a problem, but once you starting doing real stuff IO quickly becomes an issue. Going with the Pi 4 would let them use the relatively open platform that Broadcom provides, but it's also difficult to see what this brings over an Android with a soft keyboard.
This device is using the Compute module rather than the standard form factor Pi. This allows them to package the device according to their requirement, but there is no date for a Pi 4 Compute module.
But I've never worried about USB 2 and I would buy one of these things without hesitation, and a small bluetooth keyboard to go with it.
The advantage of this over Android is that it is not Android. Android is absolutely no 'kin way José for me.
In fact, I think this could fill some of the the space left by Pii-Top.
Pi-Top made a bad decision in my opinion, by changing their form factor to one any maker could knock up for themselves. It's harder for a home user to come up with a laptop housing, which Pi-Top seem to have abandoned. I see no need for PiTop 4.
I have frequently hit problems with IO on USB 2, happens quite quickly when you're trying to use the disk and the network.
It's a tablet. Why as well as how would you be using one for an IO-intensive application? It doesn't have a wired Ethernet port and not much in the way of USB connectivity either. It's something you take with you, as a portable screen that's a bit bigger than the average phone, with some input capabilities so that you can enter bits of data More than just occasional text input makes nearly all users reach for an auxiliary BT keyboard. This particular tablet runs Raspbian, so its use cases may be diverging somewhat from the average Android or iPad ones, but it's still a tablet form factor which skews heavily towards screen output, not, for instance, data logging and processing.
Any reason they used the compute module rather than whacking in the bog standard (easy to replace) Pi 3?
Because the Compute module is on a DIMM format PCB, with no external connectors apart from its edge connector.
This means they can lay out the connectors and external components as they wish, and produce a slimmer device, the CM is there for this kind of thing.
Also, a DIMM is pretty easy to replace and the CM3+ costs £30 inc VAT at CPC.
Well, they have a temperature sensor, at least.
I'm not sure the Pi is likely to be terribly useful as a handheld battery-powered device if these benchmarks are right.
The Pi doesn't have a low power mode and the Pi 3 appears to draw 260mA when idle (and 20-30mA when halted unless the power is physically disconnected) before you add peripheral devices, so it's going to have a relatively modest standby time, I would have thought - or an enormous battery. And that's before you try to actually use it.
The Pi doesn't have a low power mode and the Pi 3 appears to draw 260mA when idle (and 20-30mA when halted unless the power is physically disconnected)
This guy basically added a power/shutdown switch, with which you lose the instant-on of real tablets but given that it's a DIY project I could live with such a limitation.
Phones, tablets and powerbanks list them as mAh because 1000mAh sounds so much larger than 1Ah.
Expressing battery capacity for some device in amp-hours is rather silly though when they don't spec the battery output voltage. A 10Ah motorcycle battery is storing 120Wh, 432kJ, where a 10000mAh powerbank merely manages 37Wh, 133.2kJ
The proper capacity unit would be hamsterfortnight at the standard LiPo voltage:
$ units
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2016-06-21
2815 units, 92 prefixes, 86 nonlinear units
You have: 4.8 * 3.7 watt * hour
You want: hamster * fortnight
* 2.8014286
/ 0.35696073
for those that want a real keyboard and mouse there is always bluetooth and since these are standard for linux then everthing should work without problems unlike the gemini which will suffer the usual problems of keyboard and mouse not being stardard for android.
Also since this is the previous generation of the PI then it isnt spectre vulernable so is safe for internet use.
Realistically, the Gemini does not support Linux. Yes, it's possible to install it, but some key features do not work and Planetcom's idea of "support" is that someone out there in the Linux community will get things running eventually. Very disappointing if you actually want a Linux device - it's really just an Android PDA.
I'm not sure that I'd bother with this, but a reasonable screen size, powered by a Raspberry Pi, and using Bluetooth for keyboard and Mouse could be a quite powerful machine. The Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM is a solid base.
What I would wait for is the ability to boot from a USB-attached SSD, which isn't a Pi 4 option yet. It's early days, several add-ons are appearing, and there are some very nice Pi 3 cases which would tempt me in a Pi 4 equivalent. All these things take time.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
