cutiepi-board VS The-Open-Book

I like the CutiePi design.

One decent example I can think of off the top of my head is the CutiePi, which is a cool little tablet with a UI built with QML.

Mistaken.

Personally I've been waiting for the CutiePi to use the CM4, and now they have updated the platform I'll probably get one myself.

Having said that it looks like a missed opportunity here for supplying the masses with a Linux device for learning purposes especially in the developing countries during the pandemic or not. I think the best price for this device is USD$100 as promised by the ill fated OLPC laptop project. Perhaps USD$100 is not much by developed countries standard incomes but in most part of developing countries you are very lucky to have USD$100 disposable income at the end of the month (or year) to buy your children a tablet/laptop/computer.

It also interesting to note that the 2019 Galaxy Tab A (without LTE) with similar specs (8", 2 GB RAM, etc) to the CutiePie is probably cost about USD$100 nowadays [1].

The good news is that since CutiePie is based on open hardware system perhaps someone can use the open design to come up with a cheaper version closer to the USD$100 price point[2].

p/s: RPi 400 costs about USD$100 but the fact it does not has a built-in screen limits it impacts on usability department for children

[1]https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_tab_a_8_0_(2019)-976...

[2]https://github.com/cutiepi-io/cutiepi-board

Have you seen the "Open Book" project?

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

Open book project https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

If you want to get all custom, you could build an e-reader https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-powered-open-source-ebook-reader

>I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

This may be up your alley.

It's not a commercial off the shelf product, but the Open Book uses a 4.2" screen. There are other devices you can find on places like AliBaba that are kinda small. However, in general you won't find a name brand commercial ereader under 6" that isn't ina phone body. There were a couple at 5" back-when but the industry really settled on 6" as the common base size.

This is very useful to see examples of how people have used APIs that are either poorly documented or not at all. Or even that are well documented, really. Going from docs to code is not always straightforward.

To give you just one example, recently I've been using it to find how people have written code to interface with e-ink displays. I usually have the datasheet which lists all the commands the protocol support, but building it all into a valid startup sequence of ~20 commands to activate the display is left as an exercise for the reader.

So the docs will look like this: https://www.waveshare.com/w/upload/6/6a/4.2inch-e-paper-spec...

And what I need is a sequence like this: https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book/blob/5c5054c58...

There is a link to the project early in the article: https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book