Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 34 replies
  • Subscribers 59 subscribers
  • Views 3382 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

Lowest cost Android tablet as a component?

morgaine

I just found this Scroll 4" Android tablet in CPC's latest catalogue, and since it features a Cortex-A8 with 512MB RAM, "BBB with LCD" immediately sprang to mind.  Of course it's not that, and it has a totally non-viable spec for a tablet in 2013, but the pre-VAT price of £29.95 appeals to my liking of nanoscale pricing.

 

At that price it could even be used as a component, for example bolted onto the front of a 3D printer as an UI panel.

 

Does anyone know of an even cheaper non-eBay Android tablet with at least a Cortex-A8 CPU?  (This tablet's SoC is an Allwinner A13 like on Olimex's A13-OLinuXino range of boards.)

 

 

Parents Reply Children
  • in reply to Former Member

    Hehe tempting!

    By the way, at hipstercircuits I saw today that Elias has gone the route of creating a very hi-res display connected via HDMI connector. It looks really cool. And he is using a contemporary LCD so the quality is good.

    I was considering a step much further down from that; just a lower-res display connected to the LCD parallel interface, using the low-cost Sony PSP-1 or 2 LCDs that are flooded on ebay always. The tablet that Morgaine found is cheaper than BBB+PSP LCD though!

  • in reply to shabaz

    As tablet prices drop into silly territory, it becomes totally viable to treat them as a component rather than as a mobile personal computing gadget.  I used to use little 4x20 serial-connected green LCDs attached to the fronts of servers for at-a-glance status visibility (oh alright, I admit, it was just because they looked cool), but if I were to do it again today, an ultracheap tablet like that would make much more sense.  And of course, it provides input too.

     

    PS. I found 3 A13-based tablets listed at Amazon UK for pennies under £30, all 7" units.  CPC's price is no fluke then.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    but if I were to do it again today, an ultracheap tablet like that would make much more sense.

    yeah, price is worth it just for the display, that you get the soc behind it for 'free' is a bonus.

     

    If you can find a way to bring out i2c or spi then you can do almost anything with it. I may just have to get one and see...

  • in reply to Former Member

    Totally agree they are now much cheaper than the so called hobby modules around.

    You can merely consider them to be USB attached video devices or Human Interface Devices for your project du jour.

     

    I was thinking of a project where a tablet worked as a mouse come window selecting device rather than having small representations of a given window on the main screen place them on the tablet and press the one you wanted to hop to