DIY: Build Your Own Tablet For $400

If you think that Apple and other tablet manufacturers out there aren’t coming up with the tablet device of your dreams, maybe you might want to take a crack at it, and show them who is the boss? Liquidware, an open source hardware company, is currently selling its Beagle Embedded Starter Kit for $400, which allows you to do a little DIY magic and churn out your very own tablet device. The kit contains a 4.3-inch OLED touchscreen that can be mounted directly on the BeagleBoard, a single board computer from Texas Instruments that comes bundled with a 1GHz processor. You also get a battery module and a 4GB pre-formatted SD card to boot Angstrom Linux, though you’re free to install Google’s Android OS too. Since it doesn’t offer any storage beyond the SD card, it’s quite lightweight, weighing in at just 8 ounces. Users will be able to plug in a larger SD card, external hard drive or even a solid state drive (SSD) via the on-board USB port. Battery life will vary from three to six hours, depending on your usage. So are you still going to come up with your very own tablet device?

Matthew Chung
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Android, DYI, Google, linux, open source, Tablet