We always get excited when we buy a new tablet. But after a few months, it usually winds up at the bottom of a pile of papers on the credenza, a victim of not being as powerful as our desktop computers and not being as convenient as our phones. However, if you don’t mind a thick tablet, you can get the RasPad enclosure to fit around your own Raspberry Pi so it can be used as a tablet. Honestly, we weren’t that impressed until we saw [RTL-SDR] add an SDR dongle inside the case, making it a very portable Raspberry Pi SDR platform.
The box is a little interesting by itself, although be warned it costs over $200. For that price you get an LCD and driver board, a battery system, speakers, and an SD extension slot with some control buttons for volume and brightness. There’s a video of the whole setup (in German) below.
The whole affair weighs about 1 kg, a bit heavy for a tablet. It is also fairly thick although that’s good for making this kind of modification and also gives the touch screen a nice angle when it is flat on a table.
Most Raspberry Pi software isn’t setup for a touchscreen, but the post explains some of the issues they found when using a different Linux build instead of the default tablet software from the maker of the case.
We worried that the SDR inside the case would be subject to interference, but apparently, with an external antenna, it was negligible. You could see the interference when using an antenna attached directly to the box through the added RF connector, though. Your results could be worse if you used an SDR dongle without proper shielding, too.
We think we might prefer a more futuristic form factor. You can also get SDRs that directly work with the Raspberry Pi.
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