OSHW: Small tablet based on RK3568 and AMOLED screen

Just found this Chinese Open Source HardWare site and wanted to share this cute project with you.

21 usd

The right device at the right time can spur all kinds of revolutions. Sous vide water bath cooking was based on a laboratory immersion heaters, the WRT54g router spawned OpenWRT et al., commodity arc welders became a key part of carbon 60 research, XBox Kinect sensors got repurposed for all sorts of proximity hacks. The recent fad for particular brands of child oriented power banks in the through hiking community is the most recent one I can think of.

So therefore it’s a long shot, but this device or a device like it could be the mutation that causes a Cambrian explosion in mobile hardware, albeit one where you ahen apparently need to glue the screen on yourself, post delivery. (See the below-fold video.)

I cross every one of my fingers!

Now it needs a 4G / 5G modem, and a camera, and it could be a compact phone,

> The recent fad for particular brands of child oriented power banks in the through hiking community is the most recent one I can think of.

This sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?

It doesn't fit into the list as a revolution (or even 'evolution') as it's just a high-density, compact and cheap battery [1] that turns out to be quite unsafe [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322135

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46071317

It's probably a reference to the Haribo power bank thing (which appears to be poorly made and dangerous).

Through a chance piece of design, the leading power pack in terms of energy density is made by / branded on behalf of Haribo, a confectionary company:

https://www.ultralightnerd.com/index.php/2025/06/26/haribo-m...

What’s interesting is, like the other products, it was designed and marketed for one purpose but has become very popular for another. (Although in this case it could well just be a fashion, especially given how uniquely identifiable the product is.)

What about it? The site's in Chinese.

The RK3568 is an interesting choice, why no the H700 or something with a good amount of mainline kernel support already?

Site says it runs Linux

Does anyone have insights on how compatible that hardware might be? Or how it might compare to something like a Pinetab?

For some years I have been looking for a low cost tablet with good Linux support for use in home automation or information displays. Surprised there is still nothing like this in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.

How does one get a board like this one made?

That is an incredible price.

I don’t know about the h700, but some of those allwinner chips used to be super cheap around Covid. I checked and didn’t find prices? Does anyone know where the price is now?

The comment section say they were using second hand component. Basically salvage yard parts.

also, they were taking advantage of free sampling of JLCPCB in China. The main pcb is basically free

>The right device at the right time can spur all kinds of revolutions.

for me it's 11" tablet, I'm saving for this. prey for me y'all.

The main aspect of the design for popularity being low price, bought with subpar quality. It will fade soon after recent examination mentioned in sister comments to yours.

It was to good/cheap to be true.

Seems like there's still a bit of work to go:

1. The device restarts after running for a while after Wi-Fi is enabled. The problem may be due to insufficient power supply. 2. Overheating: The chip may overheat and restart.

Add transport, tariffs and vat, and you could as well buy a cheap Android tablet from Walmart.

Pinetab 2 is the very similar rk3566 chip, so support would be somewhat similar (probably a lityle worse, since the device trees haven't had as much attention).

Rk3568 doesn't have good mainline support??

This looks like the perfect thing to replace my POS Jenn-Air oven's defective touchscreen control panel...

Send it to JLCPCB + JLCSMT. The board was made with EasyEDAY (JLC's web PCB tool) which has a one-click "manufacture" button.

What I find most impressive is the design was made using EasyEDA, JLC's web PCB design tool, and only on a four layer board. That BGA with DDR4 on 4 layers is something!

Why people actually use those clunky web-based tools is beyond me. It's like using a normal design tool but worse in every conceivable way.

Is it though? EasyEDA is more than sufficient for most uses that don’t require large amounts of layers or components. It’s easy to pickup by a novice, has basic ERC, well integrated into LCSC ecosystem.

It doesn’t have the versatility of KiCAD but is lighter and easier for light use or occasional design of moderate complexity.

What worries me is that a lot of resistors / capacitors are placed at seemingly arbitrary angles. It looks messy and unprofessional. I wouldn't be surprised if this has many electrical problems due to amateurish PCB design.

I read some analysis about specifically this battery pack, that shows it may not be the bee's knees: https://www.lumafield.com/first-article/posts/whats-hiding-i...

> The right device at the right time can spur all kinds of revolutions.

But can they run Half-Life 2?

I keep wanting to get into Kicad, and the learning curve did become easier in the last years. But what I _want_ is to get a usable board into my hands, not just create a beautiful layout file. Historically, my pain points were were footprints, parts sourcing and SMT soldering. From a hobbyist-with-limited-time perspective, EasyEDA and the integrated JLCPCB assembly flow solved all these problems good enough that the hurdle to figure out how to do it with KiCAD was always higher. The minute I find a similar level of convenience in KiCAD + plugins, I'll gladly ditch being tied to online.

I tried to start with KiCAD so many times and never could fully figure out how to do the basics of what I wanted to do. Mind you I was designing absolutely basic boards using capacitors, MOSFETs, resistors, some basic SMD sensors and ESP8266 modules. EasyEDA has a downloadable version that is significantly less clunky and the UI makes a lot of sense to an amateur. Plus of all the things I had tried it had me spend the least time finding footprints for components that were actually available and affordable. Nothing quite like picking out a capacitor just to find out that it costs $0.84/each while an equivalent but slightly different one would be $0.0037/each.

Do you know of a cheap android tablet with a ~4" screen? Cause I don't see those too often.

Oh, KiCAD's old UI was fucked. If you started on, like, KiCAD 4.0, then I can see why you bounced right off it. Today's UI is good, so I actually recommend starting on that over something like EasyEDA.

Footprints are a point in EasyEDA's favor, but in simple circuits, almost all footprints are universal. If you want a 10K+5% resistor, you just put in a 0402 (maybe larger if you're planning on hand soldering it) and pick the exact part afterwards.

It's like trying to find a bus with 4 seats - it won't usually be called a tablet if it's so small (usually ~7" is the cutover).

Regardless of what you call it, can you find a cheap device similar to the the one described in the article?

To me yes, absolutely. In the page's comments, the listed build costs are described as being based on minimal second hand parts costs. One could skip this step and go for used Android phones directly snugly at the same price range for equal or better features/functionality/performance. The hardest part is to sort through ones which have unlockable bootloaders and the like. Of course there is nothing wrong with wanting to hack on hardware, quite the opposite, just it's not leading to a hardware assembly at jaw dropping prices (even if you consider the used part sourcing/shipping and assembly effort 100% free).

To others, it depends what "it" in the page even is to them. I'm sure someone would say "but I want to find exactly a 3.92 inch 1080x1240 resolution AMOLED touch screen with... as seen here - can you point me to that?" to which I'm not sure the price even matters anymore. The only thing that is 100% this device BOM is this device BOM, for however much that's supposed to be worth saying.

Some things are incredibly cheap here in China. You can buy a brand new bicycle for 12 USD…. 30 years ago these were like the luxury cars of today.

Oh good to know. Mostly footprints I had issues with were things like really tiny through hole adapters to plug in sensors. But I will take a look.