CutiePi Raspberry Pi tablet finally hits Kickstarter

We covered the announcement of the CutiePi tablet in 2019, and, back then, the official crowd-funding campaign was expected to go live by the beginning of 2020. Apparently, the launch of the project was delayed because of the global pandemic, but the Kickstarter campaign is finally live now. Since there was a half a year gap, the team behind the CutiePi tablet had time to revise and upgrade the hardware specs from version 1.1 to version 1.2.

CutiePi started out as an open source project with its entire hardware and software designs available to download for everyone interested in building the device as a DIY project. Nevertheless, if you are not that into building PCBs or 3D-printing cases yourself, you can back this project on Kickstarter and get a fully assembled tablet for around US$200, or you can just get the hardware PCB (without the compute module) for US$89 if you are able to 3D print the case and slap an LCD to it. The tablet is expected to ship in November.

Right now, the Super Early Bird and Early Bird offers are already gone, but backers can still get the US$189 Overslept Bird package (limited to 450) for US$189 or the Kickstarter Special package (unlimited) for US$189 which include a tablet, a microSD card and a cable set for GPIO and MCU.

The tablet itself measures 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches and comes with an attachable handle that also acts as a stand. It integrates an 8-inch IPS LCD touchscreen with 1280 x 800 resolution, while the included Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Lite comes with a 1.2 GHz Broadcom BCM 2837 ARM Cortex-A53 processor coupled with 1 GB of RAM. This module is attached to a PCB that offers access to connectors like 6x GPIO pins, USB-A 3.0 and USB-C 3.0 (with charging) ports, a micro HDMI video out, plus a microSD card slot. There also is a Wi-Fi 5 + Bluetooth 4.0 module and the case comes with stereo speakers, a 5000 mAh battery, a gyroscope, sleep/wake button and even some power management features.

For the software part, the tablet is running Raspbian Linux OS combined with a custom CutiePi Shell UI that adds extended touchscreen features like an on-screen keyboard, battery indicator and touch-optimized web browser.