Hello from 2021! If you haven’t been following us on any of our social media, then the first point below might come as a surprise for you.

First, CutiePi now supports CM4! This will effectively drop support for CM3+ Lite, but this change is mostly for the better, and is one that most of our backers are onboard with. Speaking of backers;

Second, following a successful crowdfunding project that is expected to ship in April 2021, we are opening a second batch of pre-orders for those who did not make it in time to our Kickstarter crowdfunding project.

The second batch is currently on sale for $199 USD until April 2021, and is expected to ship in early July 2021 (a few months after the Kickstarter batch has shipped). For details and pre-orders, please visit our product page. At the moment we have quite a limited supply of CM4s so we’ll be shipping the pre-orders FIFO style.

Third, below are the updated technical specifications for the CM4 CutiePi tablet:

• Upgraded CutiePi board v2.1 and CM4 WiFi version Lite 2GB RAM
• Processor: Broadcom BCM2711 Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz (same as in Raspberry Pi 4 Model B)
• Added one on-board microphone, and one additional camera connector
• 5000mAh battery

Fourth, the hardware design, same as before, is still fully open source and has been released on Github.

Fifth, just in case you missed it, CutiePi now supports CM4!!!

And those are the 5 fresh new ingredients for 2021!

CutiePi, the world’s thinnest Raspberry Pi tablet, now supports CM4 was originally published in CutiePi Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

CutiePi started out as a hobby project amongst colleagues and friends. And while it still is, the amount of support and interest we are getting from the tech community, in general, has been a major factor on making this project grow into what it is today.

We can’t say thank you enough to everyone, which is why we decided to do something different for this update.

First, what do you, our readers, want to see on CutiePi?

Any specific app that you want supported? Do you have any specific demonstration videos of CutiePi you want to see? If so, let us hear them on Twitter by mentioning @cutiepi_io and we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can.

Also, we have a telegram chat group, if you’re interested in chatting with the CutiePi team about the project. We are a chatty bunch.

Join us on Telegram: https://t.me/cutiepi_io

Second, about our crowdfunding campaign.

We are going to use Kickstarter as our platform of choice. The project is almost ready to launch. So close to completion in fact, that we can say that our launch date will be the last week of June, 2020.

Third, what about the price, you ask? Well, that is something that will be announced upon launch of the crowdfunding campaign. However, making profit was never the first priority of this project, so we are trying our very best to acquire a better deal for you, our supporters.

Fourth, as we move closer to our release date, we have been receiving quite a number of questions, and we’ve grouped them accordingly, and will respond here, to set the record straight:

• Is CutiePi board swappable with standard Pis?
  No. CutiePi tablet was custom designed to be thin. Also, we are using Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Lite, which isn’t swappable with the standard Pi.
• Why use Pi 3 and not Pi 4?
  We are using Compute Module 3+ Lite, which contains “the guts of a Raspberry Pi 3 (the BCM2837 processor and 1GB RAM)”. It has better balance between computing power and power consumption, and, more importantly, we don’t need to worry about active cooling (for example, fan) for the device.
  We are aware of the limitations of the Pi 3 processor, which is why we are continuously optimizing the software, to make it run as smoothly as possible.
• What is the battery life like?
  With 50% display brightness, and with active network connections, the standby battery life is roughly around 5 hours. You can refer the chart we made here, and a time lapse video from one of our tests. We’ll keep working on this to achieve even better results.

Fifth, our team, mostly myself, is always in the mood to do interviews and demos of CutiePi. So if you are press, or someone that can help us spread the CutiePi goodness, feel free to reach us at:

Contact: Penk Chen <hello@cutiepi.io>
Press kit: https://cutiepi.io/assets/CutiePi-MediaKit.zip

And those are the 5 ingredients of this month’s CutiePi. Stay at home and stay safe.

Fifth Serving: CutiePi FAQs, Communication Channels, and Crowdfunding Campaign | CutiePi Blog was originally published in CutiePi Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After 2 months of silence, this blog update brings you up to speed on what we have been up to thus far. But first…

We hope everyone reading this is safe, and happily isolated within the confines of their own pie shops.

In light of the current events, we have decided to stay silent for the past couple of months while we vigilantly monitored what was happening around the world. But our staying silent does not equate to inaction from our side. We have been making great progress, and we would like to take this time to update you on our most recent serving, and in the process, reboot our blog.

5 key ingredients for this month’s recipe.

First, whilst the global pandemic that is COVID-19 has affected our original plans, we are still on track for our original release date of Spring 2020. In fact, our manufacturers just made the latest batch of PCBs, which has since been safely delivered into our possession.

Second, the PCBs that arrived are the most recent revisions, which we are now calling CutiePi board v1.2. The major change for this revision is that certain connectors have been replaced with SH1.0, which allowed us to make the final product 12mm thin. You can find the design files by following the link: https://github.com/cutiepi-io/cutiepi-board

Third, we have finally completed our enclosure design, as you can see in the rendering below. Also, did we mention that this design is under the Creative Commons license? No? Well now you know.

Fourth, using the finalized enclosure designs, we 3D printed our own cases. Behold, our fully functional prototypes.

Fifth, saving the most exciting update for last, XWayland support is now working on CutiePi shell!

A lot of you asked for it, so we tried to bake it just as you wanted. Basic functionalities such as running X11 apps on top of CutiePi shell is now possible. For more details, please visit the Github repository: https://github.com/cutiepi-io/cutiepi-shell

For bite-sized updates, you can follow our Twitter handle @cutiepi_io.

Finally, let us make it up to everyone for missing our last few offerings. For our Fifth Serving, which will come out promptly on May 2020, we’ll go into details regarding our crowdfunding campaign (the whens, whys and why nots).

And those are the 5 ingredients for this month’s CutiePi.

Fourth Serving: Blog Reboot, Finalized Design & A Most Requested Feature was originally published in CutiePi Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has been nearly 2 months since we last baked you a CutiePiping hot update, so we made sure this edition, the first for this year, is extra special.

5 things.

First, Happy 2020! Over the holidays we have attended weddings, voted for a new president, and ate our weight. Also, and more importantly, thank you for checking back in. Just because we missed last month’s blog update doesn’t mean we were slacking off. Far from it, we were hard at work trying to leap closer towards our goal. How close you ask? Well, read on and we’ll let you guys be the judge of that. So with that we move on to…

Second, CutiePi was featured on The MagPi issue #89! This marks CutiePi’s first print publication and we couldn’t be more excited about it. So excited, we decided to link it on this very blog: The MagPi - CutiePi project showcase.

Third, hardware updates.

The professionally designed enclosure mock-up is ALMOST done. We just need to tighten a few more loose screws.

What’s that? You want to see a video of the prototype EVEN if it’s still just the printed chassis? Well look no further than the next line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE0bM_WLhoM

We are currently in discussion with a company that does injection molding, in preparation for the completion of the final enclosure design.

Fourth, software updates.

Behold, the CutiePi shell, a mobile UI built for Raspberry Pi and Raspbian OS. It’s smooth, slick, and responsive, and we are quite proud of it.

But don’t just read it, see it in action by clicking on the link for our video demo:

And to let you know we are serious about being open, we have released source for the CutiePi shell, and along with it a pre-built Raspbian image for testing, the details can be found in the release page.

Fifth and last, and it’s all about our crowdfunding launch period.
Almost all the designs are completed, and those that are have already been released. At the rate we are going, we can safely say that we can launch sometime this Spring, 2020. We wanted to have more information to share, but alas, the Chinese New Year did not want to cooperate with our plans.

And that’s five things.

Third Serving: Extra-hot CutiePi Shell Demo & A Spread on MagPi | CutiePi Blog was originally published in CutiePi Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5 things.

First, the cornerstone of CutiePi tablet project, our very own custom designed CutiePi board, is here fresh from the oven, and boy have we got some news to share.

Behold, the black beauty that is the CutiePi board V1.1, with a big silk-printed logo to boot. And you bet your dollar we did a lot more than just marvel at this beauty. Initial test results for this batch are quite positive. Most functions, and the design changes are working, thus proving our concepts. Testing will continue over the coming weeks, so expect us to update the repos frequently during this period.

Second, we have released everything under open source license, and everything is OSHWA certified. What do we mean by that you ask? Well, all the finished layout, schematics, BOMs and gerbers are now available under open source licenses. Happy #OpenSourceHardware celebration month!

Third, this December, we will be releasing a test Raspbian image, and a 3D printable case file that anyone can use. Granted you would need to have the means to fabricate your own PCBs for them to be of use, but still. Everyone can use it.

Fourth, with the hardware parts close to being finalized, we can now reach out to some testing labs regarding RF certification pre-scan. In parallel, we’ll also continue with the design for the final product’s enclosure.

Fifth and last, we have decided to crowdfund to mass produce the CutiePi tablet. The details are still in the oven, but we will be able to share a more detailed plan, with the corresponding price in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

And that’s five things.

Second Serving: CutiePi Board V1.1 Update was originally published in CutiePi Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the CutiePi blog.

We serve hot updates, and fresh news, that we hope would be good enough to keep you coming back for more.

5 things.

One, we have an updated carrier board design, and have started with the layout for the revised PCB, CutiePi board V1.1, which will be a 6-layer immersion gold PCB. Once done, we will be ordering additional prototypes to verify our design, which includes the mechanical enclosure, RF pre-scanning, and safety certifications among other things. You can view the V1.1 schematics on Github.

cutiepi-io/cutiepi-board

Two, we have made some changes to keep the device thin, most of which are connectors related:

• Use “mid-mount” USB Type-A port
• Replace normal HDMI with micro-HDMI
• Change microUSB to the USB Type-C 6pin for power/charging

Click here for a full list of changes. No hackability features were needlessly sacrificed for this endeavour.

Three, there are also some software-side updates.

CutiePi got its name not because of how anyone in our team looks, cough cough, but because we are using Qt (kjuːt) framework.

Currently we have the Qt open source edition (Qt 5.12.5 LTS) built for Raspbian. We’ll be using QtCompositor (and Wayland), QtWebEngine (Chromium based renderer), and QtVirtualKeyboard to develop the home screen/launcher. Here’s a video of us switching between Scratch3 and the terminal emulator, to show the compositor at work:

Did the way it looked leave a bad after-taste? Don’t worry, we have exactly what you need to clear your palate, our final shell UI design:

Also, we’ve tested Compute Module 3+ Lite (CM3+L) module against our drivers, and to no-one’s surprise, it all works.

Four, we might crowdfund. But hear us out first before you start bemoaning us for even thinking this.

We are currently in talks with manufacturers to produce our devices, and they gave a good quotation for orders starting from 1,000 units. There’re also other expenses such as the lab testing fees and the RF certifications, and the final numbers could prove to be too much for a small community-driven project like ours to pay upfront. But IF we do decide to crowdfund, we swear on the old gods and new, that 100% of it will be used for mass production of the devices. Nothing will go to development, miscellaneous fees, nor our coffees.

Five and last, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to our mailing list, to receive our monthly updates. You can also check our Github repos for the latest project developments. Do you want to voice out your concerns? Send them over to hello@cutiepi.io and we’ll be in touch.

And, if you want to help spread the word about this project, please share this post amongst your peers who might be interested in having a slice of CutiePi.

And that’s five things.

CutiePi

CutiePi First Serving: General Updates was originally published in CutiePi Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.