DIY Android Tablet: Build Your Own Device with Raspberry Pi
hey everyone AR mour here and today we're going to look at how to build your very own Android OS device what this is is essentially a small tablet or even a phone replacement without the calling capabilities using a Raspberry Pi and an external touchscreen and some other Hardware components we're going to show you how to put the whole thing together all the hardware pieces and the software that goes with it in order to make your very own Android OS enabled device so get all your materials together join me let's get [Music] started so before we begin I think it's important to kind of establish what this project is for and why you would want to do something like this you can easily go on to anywhere I picked Amazon here and buy yourself an Android tablet for pretty cheap they're really not terribly expensive when you add up all the math and add up all the components that we'll be buying today but um there's a few use cases where I think it' be pretty interesting why you would want to engage in a project like this and again let's just establish what we're doing is we're taking a Raspberry Pi and we're putting Android on it and we're essentially making our own kind of mini tablet now there are a lot of different screens that you can purchase as well the one that I had was a very small screen 4.3 in for almost the same price you can buy a larger screen to make it more like a tablet I wanted it more of a phone size and I'll tell you that because how I came about this project was I was looking to buy one of these android-based MP3 players and I didn't want any I wanted very very limited internet capabilities on it um it was for my son so I didn't really want to have browsing on it I didn't want to have Tik Tok or any any uh social uh networking apps or anything like that I I didn't want I all I wanted just a music player something we could put maybe Spotify on or or whatever it was where I could limit and have control over that now a lot of these players first of all they they come with they're some of them are very cheap um and they look sleek and some of them have great reviews and uh it's great the problem is a lot of them have a very very very old version of Android so the apps won't always necessarily be compatible so this one as you can see has Android 13 but this is $200 other ones have like Oreo or Android 8 Android 7 Android 6 um older versions of Android which means you risk uh not being able to pull in the apps that you want so like let's say Spotify says we're no longer supporting Android 8 um and so or audible or whoever you're you know whatever app that you ring in so that's one concern second concern is that they have these different uh parent printing uh lock apps that you can install or run on there that basically prevent you from running any applications except for the ones that you explicitly allow problem with that is that's installed through the app store that's installed through an extra let's say APK that's installed in a mechanism that's done as a layer or veneer on top of the actual operating system as a embedded systems designer and software engineer myself who's played around a lot with the uh Android kernel uh and the Linux kernel I want to have complete control over what apps get installed and what don't and I want to be able to control that mechanism through super user um capability so running pseudo commands that only I know the password so I want to manually install these apks these packages these applications directly onto the device and nothing else there shouldn't be an app store there shouldn't be anything else I want to make sure that there is nothing on this device it's squeaky clean and the only way to do anything is by having root privileges onto the device just like you would have root privileges on your computer or whatever it is or on any other type of uh device so those were two kind of criterias I could not get that with these um the underlying chipset for a lot of these devices is the mediatech chipset which is uh from what I've researched and and delve down to was was a little bit more challenging to root and kind of reverse engineer than some of the uh more well-known devices like rooting a Samsung uh tablet or rooting a um uh a Google phone you know getting a custom image on that so those are a little bit easier but those are way more expensive and so those two criteria having a later a newer version of Android and being able to have full control over the operating system over the kernel really uh I found myself uh looking at this project over here from lineage OS now there are two ways to set up Android on your Raspberry Pi at least two ways that I've found research this person put together a tutorial with lots and lots of advertisements everywhere and uh this as well as you can see I kept closing the ads lots and lots of ads this one's from PI my life up.com and this one was from actually the person who put together this port for lineage OS and two ways of doing this is lineage OS where um this person has put together this image for Raspberry Pi uh another option is you could also use Mia OS so MIA OS is uh a uh this has like a kind of a premium model you can sign up for a fully free account and get that set up with your Android operating system and run it uh and this is good for like if you want to move into like kiosks or things like that so this is an option I wanted to go something that's completely like open source or open you know completely open that doesn't require signing up for any account so this port over here is is you can get that and kang.com devices for/ rpi4 and then you
would download the different lineage OS builds once you download that you can go through the tutorial over here so con.com devices slrp sl4 lineage os2 this is one of the examples that it gives for Android 13 they have different versions for different Raspberry Pi's um they have all the all the details the download links and everything that you need to do that as we done in pretty much every embedded device tutorial that requires a Linux based operating system you need to use balena etcher which you flash the device this they again in the tutorial they go through these which I don't want to reinvent a tutorial so I'm going to recommend that you review theirs here or the other one or here pyli up.com both of them are great and this shows you how to uh download the file and then we're going to flash it using again balena etcher so that's a little bit of the background and just give you kind of an understanding why we're doing this project next I'm going to show you how to put together all of the hardware and then we're going to load up the device for the first time just so you can see and that will be post flashing the image using balena etcher again since we're familiar with a lot of the previous tutorials using balena eter uh we will skip that process especially because it's all here in the tutorial we will go straight to loading up the device for the first time and before that let's take a look at how to put the hardware together all right so I've got all my components together as you can see I have my Raspberry Pi right over here and my screen over here the box that it comes with all of this came in this box from wave share this is the wave share 4.3 in touchcreen that I mentioned in the video earlier and now I I going to show you how to put it together pretty straightforward uh I did expedite I to in order to expedite this video I did do a few things beforehand these are pretty simple you have to put the fan in right over here into the um into the housing as you can see I've screwed them in right over here so I'm going to move that aside and then there are all these standoffs that I installed uh right over here here this last standoff just to show you just to demonstrate I have this last standoff here I'm going to screw that in and with these standoffs this will hold the Raspberry Pi itself so I'm going to put that right in there and my Raspberry Pi has the SD card already in there so that's an important point you need to make sure that it turns on and everything works fine afterwards now I'm going to put my raspberry pie in here and let's just do a sanity check here so this looks like this will fit just like that so now I need to install the ribbon which goes right here so this is a little tricky I installed the one right over here I'm going to show you how to install it here so have to pull this up a little bit pull that up so again this is closed I'm going to open it up stick this in you kind of sometimes you can do it with with one hand sometimes it helps to do it with two um again you want to test the connection before you you close the whole thing so I'm going to it could be uh it could be a little tricky so as you can see I'm kind of struggling not a huge fan of these ribbon cables but they work okay so that's locked in place you should hear like a click and uh it looks looks pretty good to me so I'm going to screw this Raspberry Pi on now um it would be good if you want to test just to make sure that the screen is working that you got the ribbon cable hooked up correctly so I'm going to go ahead and do that and there you go okay so we can see the screen so that means the the cable is working so now I'm going to put these guys in here and again just be patient it can take a little bit of time to do all this some of these screws are little bit small but you should be able to manage and you'll notice there are all sorts of different screw sizes as you see over here I've kind of put them next to each other the flat ones go for the case the ones that are a little bit rounded on the head those are for the Raspberry Pi itself all right so now we have that all screwed in we can attach the fan as well although I do want to double check make sure everything is functional first before we attach all of that always a good idea to do a sanity check that takes a couple minutes to load up so as you can see it loaded up up fine so I am going to put the case in now just uh something you should know with the fan this fan goes right so if you look at the pins it goes by these two pins a little hard to see I'm going to plug it in and then show you so you can see so if you see it's on the Outer Edge Ed row of pins we skip the first one and then the red wire goes to the next pin and then the black wire goes to the next pin hopefully that is clear enough and then we put this in so at this point right now the device is very loose the screen is going to be very loose so what we want to do is we want to put in the remaining screws over here and then we can turn turn it back on just to double check and again it's always good to to test it every step of the way turn it on check it make sure no cables weren't loose especially that ribbon cable it can be a little bit of a nuisance it can be a little bit of a pain so uh it's always good to to just check every step of the way and as you can see here the gpios are exposed so if you want to create your own power button or uh any type of uh external connection or external device you want to hook up over uart or spy or however you want to do that you can do that through the GPI opens that are exposed there so that's kind of neat if you want to create your own custom Hardware based off of all of this and now we screw the last one in and while up we're ready to go and we can plug this in and now we don't need that external video uh HDMI cable to hook up to the Raspberry Pi until now I was using this Cable in order to plug it into HDMI I don't need to do that anymore because I have the device itself and there it is now it will load up and you should be able to get going okay so I've waited close to 10 minutes for this to come up but now it's up and running and depending on your micro SD card how new it is how fast it is um this could take longer or shorter but it it does take a while to get booted up so just be patient so now that it's up and running I'm going to click on start after it says welcome to lineage OS they want you to accept that this is not being used for commercial use and you click on for me it's going to be English language and then they want to connect to Wi-Fi for right now I'm going to skip all of that I don't need to hook up to Wi-Fi they want you to set the date and time again we're just going to kind of pass through that for right now and show you how this all gets set up it can sometimes be a little bit glitchy um when you first bring up but once it gets established and and you get the operating system going it it works pretty well you'll see this sometimes just click wait uh and it'll it'll go through so so I'm just going to click next just so you have an understanding of what's going on so we can get to sure why not wait not now again I'm just kind of clipping through all the prompts so we can get to the base okay and then we are going to click Start and then what this will do is bring up the kind of main screen the home and as you can see I have a mouse hooked up let's close the wizard actually so as you can see I have the mouse hooked up and I am using that for now eventually I will use the touchcreen so here you have it now we have the full Android OS so what I'm going to do is I'm going to SL click and slide up or I can I can hit enter actually if I want um I can double tap enter to click on that I can hit different buttons to kind of get out so this is the Windows key um and I can use this to click on different apps as you can see over here this is taking me to different applications now once I hook up the screen you'll be able to see all of these different apps things like that then you can side load things with apks uh you can get yourself full rout access as well uh all of that can be found in the settings there are specific Raspberry Pi settings that lineage OS has put together for the device so if you see first of all we're confirming that we are using a Raspberry Pi 4 so you can see right over here Android version is 14 and then we can also go into the build number click on that six times and then enabled the developer settings so with the developer settings we can get ourselves access to a lot of um you know ways to terminal and uh get into the device all the all the kind of like secret access of the device itself to get into the Linux kernel so that's basically it as you can see it's also in landscape mode you can turn that into uh portrait mode there are all sorts of different uh settings and different things that you can do in order to model modify uh how you want to play around with this this is basically just to give you like a kind of a quick rundown on on how this all works and what you can do as you can see over here again developer options there are also specific options specific settings for the Raspberry Pi in here um I'm just going to go to developer option so you can see you can set up uh SSH and terminal and a whole bunch of crazy stuff again Raspberry Pi settings this is cool because you can modify uh a lot of the uh see display rotation and the resolution um all the different things that you can change you can set up a power button uh hook that up to the gpio on the back same with volume buttons and another thing that's really nice about this is you can play around with creating different gpios and accessing those gpio accessing uh uh external devices through the gpio on the raspberry too so that's kind of really cool that gives you like kind of an entry point into developing your own Android based device so whether that's an infotainment system or that is a kiosk system or some sort of custom Android phone that you want to eventually build yourself or tablet so a lot of this uh you you're going to spend need to spend a lot of time kind of exploring and uh understanding how all this pieces together but at least this gets you like a beginner start on how to really build kind of your own Android OS based tablet so today we looked at how to put together a full Android OS enabled device this has the touchscreen the housing for the Raspberry Pi and also flashing the image getting it all up and running using the lineage OS Port of Android OS 4 Raspberry Pi if you enjoyed this video check out the rest of the videos in this channel hit that like button and hit subscribe thanks for watching [Music] [Music]
2025-03-07 10:13
