Let’s see if I can keep this relatively short:
I’m a woodworker, I do my design work in FreeCAD and then I print out my drawings on paper to carry out to the shop with me. It would be nicer if I had a shop-proof device to run FreeCAD in the shop with me because over the past year I found myself saying the following things in the shop a lot:
- “Wait, let’s go in and look at the 3D model.”
- “Ah dang I forgot to note this particular dimension on the drawing, let me go fix that.”
- “I’ll measure this part up then go in and do some drawing.”
So what does “shop proof” mean exactly?
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Wood shop be dusty. Last year I hauled 250 gallons of sawdust to the dump. To me this means that a physical keyboard needs to be able to function if it’s been packed with dust and/or needs to be vacuum cleaner proof. I also think cooling fans are probably a bad idea; a passively cooled device is probably preferable.
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Not many outlets in the shop, so it needs a good battery life. I actually don’t need a tremendous amount of performance, I’ve used a Raspberry Pi 3 for the kind of CAD work I do.
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FreeCAD does not ship an APK so Android is no bueno, it’s gotta be GNU/Linux.
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It needs decent usable Wi-Fi because I envision using Syncthing to keep my woodworking projects folder synced between my desktop and this device. It doesn’t necessarily need to get signal out in the shop (my phone barely does; I lose signal if I stand behind the drill press) but it does have to connect to my Wi-Fi when I carry it into the house.
I think this means I’m looking for an ARM tablet that can competently run Linux. Is there such a thing?
ADDENDUM:
Thanks to everyone who commented, I think I do have a plan of action: I’m gonna buy a used Lenovo!
To answer the question I posed, no it doesn’t seem that a Linux ARM tablet is really a thing yet. Commercial offerings that run Android or Windows on ARM are often so locked down that switching OS isn’t a thing, the few attempts at a purpose built ARM tablet for Linux like the PineTab just are not ready for prime time.
In the x86 world, it basically came down to 10 year old Toughbook tablets or 4 year old low-end 2-in-1s, and I think the latter won out just because of mileage and condition. A lot of the toughbooks out there will have 10 year old batteries in them, and they’ve been treated like a Toughbook for some or all of that time. The few Lenovo’s I’ve looked at are barely used, probably because of how Windows “runs” on them.
I’ll eventually check back in with progress on this front. Would it be better to add to this thread or create another?
Not an absolute requirement but as I said I’m looking for very good battery life, which isn’t x86, I’m looking for passively cooled/fanless/ventless that will survive and thrive in 100° summer heat, which also isn’t x86, and I’m looking for “end user ready” so AFAIK that rules out RISC-V at present. So that pretty much leaves ARM.
A tablet or small laptop yes. 100% must be portable and battery powered. It’s a small shop with few outlets, so a desktop box with an external monitor and keyboard is pretty much out of the question, just no space. Plus it would be nice to be able to easily carry it with me to my various workbenches and tools as I do with paper plans. A toughbook might be a possibility but they tend to be thick, heavy and cumbersome. I want to be able to grab the thing by a corner to move it from one workbench to another without wearing out my wrist.
x86 works just fine in laptops with reasonable battery life. I’m not gonna get into the debate of x86 vs ARM, but you’re not gonna find an industrial Apple M1, and ARM PCs are rare, so you shouldn’t limit yourself to ARM.
All of that makes sense, but I think you’re selling the battery capabilities of current x86 mobile devices a bit short. I have a GPD Win Max 2 gaming laptop that if I keep it in flatland all day (i.e. don’t fire up them GPU cores…) it will easily last 10-11 hours on a battery charge. The current Toughbook 40 is rated for 18 hours (!) on a single battery and a used older model with a new battery slapped into it shouldn’t fall much short of that. I would definitely give the Toughbooks a second look. Handle one in person if you can – they’re smaller than they appear in pictures. I have one lying around someplace and I can dig it out to show you later. I use mine for a similar application, i.e. I leave it in my shop (automotive, or rather motorcycle) where my issues are grease and metal shavings.
The major issue you’re going to have is that there are few to no ARM based fully integrated machines – that is, an assembled ready-to-use tablet or clamshell laptop – that are designed to have the user install their own OS. Certainly not that I’ve ever seen. They’re all going to show up with some flavor of Android in the ROM, probably an outdated one at that, and they will not be “end user ready.” You’re going to be cracking bootloaders, hunting down proprietary SoC driver blobs, etc., and there’s still no guarantee of success.
Here’s a left field plan C: Consider building a Raspberry Pi based enclosure with a screen + keyboard + battery? You could probably put together something like unto the CutiePi but with a more bodacious casing. That’d probably be a DIY job, but what you wind up with would be hardware well and truly under your control and you can, of course, install your own OS on it. Making it work would be the easy part, making it durable and dustproof enough for your purposes would be where the effort goes.
If I go the used Wintel route, I’d probably go with a Toughbook if I can find a fairly compact one. A lot of the ones on eBay in my price range are of approximate vintage to my existing laptop, but dustproof. But, “no charger included.” “Tablet only.” “No charger or battery.” etc.
Honestly I think the PineTab 2 or similar products would do…if their business model included “ever finish a product and bring a retail version to market.” A lot of the word on the street is “It’s pretty okay especially for the price, but the Wi-Fi will never work because for some reason we’re using chips that just don’t and won’t have Linux drivers.”
BTW, FreeCAD is a zero (or near enough to it, see my other comment) workload for your GPU. It does not use GPU acceleration at all internally. You said you were using FreeCAD in your original post.
I’m reasonably certain most/all of the consumer Android tablets will not be able to handle your kind of workload. Certainly not any of the very few Linuxable ones. (Credit to @jesta there for posting a few that I was not aware of). Battery life is going to be your issue, there. You’re looking at a 3-5 hour screen on time from one of those at best. And none of those are ruggedized. I think you’ve painted yourself into a corner by making your base requirements impossible for your budget. I’m not saying that to argue; I’m just saying how it is.
…Huh.
You wanna hear something wild? For years, the only reason I ever booted my Inspiron into Windows was to use Fusion360, which IS GPU accelerated, there’s a whole menu about it.
FreeCAD running in Linux on that same machine always outperformed Fusion360, and you’re telling me FreeCAD runs in software rendering? I’ve long suspected the discrete GPU on that laptop wasn’t working properly, this might just confirm it.
https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?style=4&t=65717
FreeCAD of course “uses” the GPU in the same way that any graphical application must do, in order to put pixels or polygons into the screen buffer, within the graphics driver for whatever your video card is. The Coin3D modelling engine behind the scenes technically uses OpenGL for the final render to screen but none of the model geometry calculation or tessellation uses the GPU in any capacity whatsoever. FreeCAD’s workload is therefore almost entirely in software on the CPU.
That I knew because you can run FreeCAD without it’s GUI, you can import it as a module into any random Python script if you really want to.
I wonder if the raytracing workbench can run on the GPU? And I’ve got like three other things I should be concentrating on that I’m not going to look it up.