We always get excited when we buy a new tablet. But after a few months, it usually ends up at the bottom of a pile of loan documents, a victim of not being as powerful as our desktops and not as convenient as our phones. However, if you don’t mind a thick tablet, you can make the RasPad case fit around your own Raspberry Pi so that it can be used as a tablet. Honestly, we weren’t so impressed until we saw it [RTL-SDR] add an SDR key to the boxwhich makes it a very portable Raspberry Pi SDR platform.
The box is a bit interesting in itself, although there is a warning that it costs over $ 200. For this price you get an LCD and a board with drivers, battery system, speakers and SD expansion slot with some buttons to control the volume and brightness. Below is a video of the entire setup (in German).
The whole affair weighs about 1 kg, a little heavy for a tablet. It is also quite thick, although it is good for making this kind of modification and also gives the touch screen a nice angle when flat on a table.
Most Raspberry Pi software is not set up for a touch screen, but the post explains some of the problems they found when using a different version of Linux instead of the default tablet software from the box manufacturer.
We were worried that the SDR inside the box would be subject to interference, but apparently with an external antenna this was negligible. However, you may see interference when using an antenna connected directly to the box via the added RF connector. Your results may be worse if you used an SDR key without proper shielding.
We think we would prefer more futuristic form factor. You can also get SDRs works directly with Raspberry Pi.
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