World’s First Raspberry Pi 5 tablet

By Ashley Whittaker. Posted over 1 year ago.

Lee, of the Leepspvideo YouTube channel, was having a whale of a time testing out Raspberry Pi 5 using the Dolphin emulator (dolphin-emu.org), as well as running his dual-screen setup (magpi.cc/dualscreensetup). So far, so impressed – but then his mind wandered and landed on the question: “Will a Raspberry Pi 5 fit inside SunFounder’s RasPad 3?”
RasPad 3 is a tablet designed around Raspberry Pi 4, which has an Ethernet port on the opposite side of the board to Raspberry Pi 5. There were also questions around whether RasPad 3 could power the more powerful Raspberry Pi 5.

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You can watch the ‘First Raspberry Pi 5 tablet’ build on YouTube.

Tight fit

The project began with disconnecting the fan wires from the GPIO on Raspberry Pi 5 and unscrewing the standoffs. The Ethernet and USB 3.0 cables inside the RasPad are quite short, so they were a little more stretched than is ideal in order to reach the ports on Raspberry Pi 5. The slightly different layout of Raspberry Pi 5 also meant they had to cross over each other.

Raspberry Pi 5 fits into the position previously used by Raspberry Pi 4

Once it was all connected, everything worked as normal in the Chromium browser. And the touchscreen was “nice and responsive” under the control of the super-speedy Raspberry Pi 5. RasPad 3 is a touchscreen device, but there are plenty of ports for you to plug in wireless keyboard and mouse dongles, which Lee did to test out accessing his YouTube channel. We were pleased to see that everything loaded nice and quickly, and of course, our Raspberry Pi 5 handled full-screen, high-resolution video with ease.

We’re officially crowning Lee as the creator of the first-ever Raspberry Pi 5-powered tablet. A special prize goes to the creators of RasPad 3, SunFounder, of course.

Retrofit dreams with Raspberry Pi 5

We cannot wait to see what weird and wonderful objects our newest board ends up inside. Eben is particularly keen to see someone using a 1950s TV as a display for Raspberry Pi 5, since, as he and James keep telling everyone, it can output an ancient TV standard [Editor’s note: please be careful working with old CRT TVs as they can be extremely dangerous]. Of course, an old Pye would be the dream for this, both for our nearly-shared name and for our shared Cambridge heritage. We spent a happy interlude on eBay, and someone dug up this informative and also daunting page about restoring old 405-line TV receivers, before sighing wistfully, closing about a dozen tabs, and going back to what we were all supposed to be doing. So, if you are pals with a retro TV enthusiast who’d relish the challenge, make sure you tip them the wink.