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?
Why does it have to be ARM? You are going to have a much easier time installing whatever you want on an x86 ruggedized/waterproof tablet or Toughbook. ARM devices tend to run Android and have locked bootloaders and other challenges to installing the custom OS you want.
And does it have to be a tablet? Because if not, what you're looking for is an "industrial computer," and while these are shockingly expensive to buy new, you can often find outdated ones used on eBay and similar for not much money. They're designed for use in factories. These are generally sealed, dustproof, and waterproof.
There are two ways to go, you can get a sealed fanless PC box and attach your own monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Or you can get a panel mount machine which will obviously have to be mounted somewhere, but as a woodworker I'm sure you can find a way to build a stand or otherwise attach one to something. These usually have horrible rubber or membrane keyboards if they come with a keyboard at all but can be literally hosed down, vacuumed, knocked, baked, and otherwise abused. Most are touch screens, although they are usually single point resistive ones rather than multi-touch like a consumer tablet.
Fully sealed waterproof rubber membrane keyboards are not hard to find, but I will warn you that the typing experience on them is horrible.
Lenovo Ideapad Duo 3 - x86 tablet, 4core no hyperthread CPU and 8Gb ram, no fans, detachable bt keyboard, runs Fedora 39out of the box, everything works even autorotation. I love mine.
That's a good idea, but I wonder if it'll be too fragile for OP. I was envisioning something like this:
https://www.kcosit.com/Industrial-PC-ultra-slim-tablet-PC-tablets-Win10-Intel-p1335425.html
This one is rated IPX67 waterproof and dustproof, but is of course from a no-name brand. You can get Panasonic Toughbooks used all day long on eBay for a few hundred bucks, though, which might be another good idea. A used one will probably need a replacement battery.
I might just go this way. I've heard pretty dire things about non-Thinkpad Lenovos regarding their screen hinges but that's not a factor with a detachable keyboard. I'd prefer ARM architecture but it seems that's just not a thing.
So it's "just" an x86 laptop? Normal PC BIOS? USB-C Charger?
Pretty much regular x86 laptop:
I am a hardcore thinkpad / debian / xfce aficionado, I wouldn't go and search for a device like this myself. A colleague of mine was trying to get rid of his, he bought it for his kid but running windows 10 the thing was bloody useless. I've googled somewhere that it does linux good and after limited success with Ubuntu i've tried Fedora. I recall trying a touch interface with linux long time ago (around 1st iPads) and it was a laughably misserable experience. This was amazing - IMO deffinitely better than what windows had to offer even though I understand the bar is low here. Better interface, at least as reliable (more). I've bought it off my colleague for cca 200 USD / 5000 CZK. I can imagine I would be confident enough bringing it with me on a holiday instead of full 14" thinkpad for mobility & battery life.
The vision I have for this device is to mainly use it as a viewer. I would do the vast majority of my drawing at my desktop PC with my fancy mechanical keyboard and trackball and space mouse etc. and then use the tablet to view and maybe make light revisions/edits out in the shop. I could see doing that 100% with the touch screen.
If I were doing something like measuring a thing to design for (say I was going to build a stand for a strangely shaped flower pot) I might use it to key the dimensions into FreeCAD (which has a built-in spreadsheet module) then go in the house to do the actual drafting on my main PC.
Would it be too much to ask you to try running FreeCAD on it? See how it performs?
Not at all 😉.
I've installed FlatHub originating FreeCAD 0.21.2 from "Software" app (very AppleStore like experience minus the signing in). It spinns up in cca 10 seconds. I've opened the "ArchDetail" demo example it offers, after discovering the "Gesture" option in the bottom right corner I can rotate and zoom the model freely using fingers with no impact on performance - no matter how quickly I "twich" with the model I can't get more than 30% CPU load spike, maybe 25% ( Fedora39 default Gnome3 windowing, CPU scaling on "power saver").
The CPU/performance IMO feels really good and not what I would expect from Intel CPUs. 1.1 GHz Base Freqency, 3.1Ghz Burst (single core I believe), some Intel graphics that can take Gnome 3 "zooming windows" with perfect fluency and all that in cca 5 Watts and no fan. The performance feels an order of magnitude better than what RPi3 would provide IMO.
Thanks @[email protected] ! Absolutely perfect.
At first I didn't know whether to be more impressed with how light FreeCAD is or how far low-end CPUs have come. So then I looked up a comparison between that Pentium Silver N5030 and my 2014 era Dell's i7-4510U. And they're actually pretty close. That's six years of progress for you I guess.
Yeah I think I'll pick one up, several are available.
I've seen some folks have some issues with suspend and such running Ubuntu on the thing, all good in Fedora? I've been a Mint guy for 10 years now and I have no experience with Fedora.
Damned, now I am afraid that I've oversold the thing. I'd hate if it came in the mail and you ended up disappointed.
There is actually one significant glitch with the picture jerking up and down on the display.
I believe it is a software glitch because I can fix it by maximizing a window on the screen or tilting window left / right. I never get to see it really, because right after login Mattermost client fills half of my screen.
Now i believe this has actually worsened since before. On previous versions (not sure 37/38) this has happened only seldomly, you had to play with the device a bit to replicate. But I believe it happened both in landscape and portrait mode.
On Fedora 39 it is absolutely unavoidable in landscape mode - it starts immediately sometimes "jumping up/down" angrily, but does not happen at all in portrait mode.
I've tried to replicate by booting Fedora 38 workstation live from flash drive - but I don't thing that was a good method looking into it - the "autorotate" didn't work whitch I am sure works after installation and I couldn't replicate the jerking at all and I am sure it was there already before. I haven't done full reinstall since I got it, it is possible it has already gone throught 37 upgrade 38 upgrade 39 and this is something I've picked up along the way but I'd be surprised. (Also don't use Unetbootin to create Fedora boot drive - I keep learning that over and over again.)
When you mention susped - I've never bloody noticed - it does not suspend automatically! My xfce systems have "presentation mode" always activated so I thought it is something i've switched on - but if so - I don't see obvious way to switch it off. I may have seen some error messages about suspend in the past? I press the power button shortly and it suspends light blinking, i press it again and it goes on again. This feels fixable but I don't mind atm. It suspends reliably when the keyboard folio closes over it too.
Finally when the keyboard is away on BT for long it runs out of juice. You have to reconnect it to charge up for few seconds and then disconnect/reconnect again to make it work.
The chasis feels sturdy enough to me, but it ain't as sturdy as a tablet (iPad / Boox ) with one piece metal backplate. Bottom half of the device back connecting kickstand is made of metal (I suspect that is where the heat exchange happens) and that is where a lot of it robustness comes from.
I am an admin by trade so I may not be objective. I have heard about but have never used Mint - I love my "xface". I do exist in deb based environment like you though and I do know default Ubuntu. I've played with Fedora before because curiosity and I think the switch is painless. Pretty much same systemd, same Gnome 3, just watch out
dnf updateupgrades packages unlikeapt. Installing this thing I haven't done a single "smart" thing. Out of the box it was better user experience than installing windows and everything except that jerking whitch before I had to notice over time worked marvelously. I think I recall looking for activation of hw acceleration in firefox and finding out it was already on. I may have usednmclito set my wireguard vpn profile but that may have been the total I've done in shell except usingdnffor speed and usingssh/tmux.I recall trying Ubuntu on it but while not useless it was far from Fedora. On Ubuntu I kept oscilating between x11 where everything worked but the touch interface was jerky and somewhat useless or wayland where touch was fine but not everything worked as I wanted. Under both scenarious the bluetooth keyboard didn't work over bluetooth - only connected, and the auto rotation was a no-go. (No "jerking" if I remember correctly!). Fedora provides the best Wayland experiece I've seen. IMO well worth learning to deal w/
dnf- even though it's only one device.I'll try a few different distros on it, see what works best.
I've never actually used Wayland; between my Nvidia GPU in my desktop and preference for Cinnamon, I've only ever used x11.
Once the machine arrives I'll make another post about it, see what I land on.
How did this turn out??
Okay, some feedback from having used this little tablet PC in a wood shop use case:
First of all I don't have anywhere to put it. a piece of paper can just sit on my workbench surface and who cares if I get boards or tools on it, a tablet feels more precious than that. This may be less of a factor in a larger shop.
MEMS sensors were a mistake. Take me back to 2007 when my convertible laptop had a button on the bezel to rotate the screen.
While we're turning off automatic features, turn off automatic screen off/suspend. This machine takes a full 8 seconds to wake back up, and when I'm in "Okay that step is done, next step, how long do the rails need to be?" mode I'm pretty sure I could chew through my own forearm in the time it takes the screen to come back on. Like I say, easy solution is don't turn the screen off. It seems to have enough battery life.
I briefly tried three DEs with this little touch screen, Mint Cinnamon is not up to it; it's 100% a desktop UI that will let you click on things by poking a laptop touch screen, it is NOT mobile friendly. Fedora KDE is willing to try but it's still desktop first, Gnome is a tablet OS that remembers when it was a desktop OS slightly too much. I would honestly rather have the "switching between apps" workflow you get from Android than the "workspaces" of Gnome because it doesn't leave enough touch gestures for applications. Just trying to scroll through a PDF, it wants to click-drag-highlight rather than just scroll.
FreeCAD continues to be second only to GIMP as "FOSS software that is amazingly powerful at what it does with the UX of a colonoscopy." It works surprisingly well on touch screen. It's not even in the same time zone as good or usable, but "works surprisingly well." It starts up, runs, opens files etc. quite competently but it's outright combative when it comes to looking at different parts of a model, switching modes, switching workbenches, looking at dimensions, selecting geometry etc. I've had it not accept input from an onscreen keyboard, so I outright couldn't change a dimension.
I'm a little tempted to build my own furniture CAD package in the Godot game engine. I don't know how to do 90% of that but I'm about to try.
The core of the idea does work though: it has been very nice being able to take measurements in the shop, put them in CAD right there, walk into my house, and then that file is just on my desktop. My favorite thing about the whole experience is Syncthing.
I installed Gallium OS on an aging Chromebook that was no longer offered support from Google. I've been able to run FreeCAD on it with no problems.
The little Acer I bought years ago is spill proof and designed to be fixable. I think it was initially intended for kindergarten classrooms.
Initially I bought one for my dad because he was constantly getting his computer infected with viruses due to forwarding emails. This little Chromebook fixed 90% of those problems.
I loved the Chromebook so much that I bought myself too. I was disheartened when Google stop supporting the hardware but then when I found out about putting that specific version of Lennox on them it gave them new life.
Yeah I'm with you; I'm also in the resurrecting old hardware with Linux club.
If I treat the little Lenovo tablet like a laptop, well...it is one. it's a small, low-end x86 PC. Standard install images work fine, it installs .rpms and flatpaks just fine, FreeCAD launches and operates correctly...with the keyboard attached.
Snap the keyboard off and it performs a heartfelt but untalented impression of a tablet. Gnome is still Gnome, it still wants to be a mouse and keyboard UI, but it has had touch support bolted on after the fact and it works about as well as tits on a fish. It's got a lot of the problems Windows 8 had in trying to be a desktop OS that can also run on tablet, but without the schizophrenia. A lot of the UI elements are still quite small even when upscaled to 200%, you can tell by the way certain UI elements fail that it doesn't like being scaled like that especially in portrait mode, and it still interprets touch inputs largely as mouse inputs. So if you try to scroll through a PDF file, you might scroll, you might highlight a bunch of text which causes it to scroll strangely.
FreeCAD has paid even less attention to touch compatibility, I've noticed that sometimes interacting with some elements via touch will cause the view controls to break until the app is restarted. The UI isn't built for fat fingers, a lot of stuff is designed for shift+clicking or for keyboard only controls, and I had a dimension dialog box refuse to accept input from the onscreen keyboard.
The hardware might be able to do what I need, the software almost certainly can't.
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.