Raspad3 Running Lineageos

A while back I was given a Raspberry Pi 4 as a prize for a conference I attended. I started looking into the Pis and all the things you can do with them, there was a lot. At first, I set it up as a computer for my young child using the TwisterOS. She enjoyed some of the games I downloaded on there but she was too young to understand the mouse and keyboard yet. So I had the idea to put a touch screen on it. This idea turned into "Can I make it into a tablet?"

I began designing a tablet build and in the process can across a kickstarter for the RasPad3. This looked exactly like what I wanted to build so I backed it. Covid and shipping delays made it almost a year later before I got the kit in. The kit was mostly straight forward to put together and I had it assembled in a couple hours. I then flashed the RasPadOS onto an sd card and put it in. Everything was working but there were things I wanted to change almost instantly. Firstly the fan that came with the kit was way too loud. I was holding a tablet but hearing a desktop. I did some research and found that bearing fans were quieter than the hydraulic fan that it was shipped with. With this information, I order a new fan and quick splice. The new fan was much quieter.

My next task was the OS. The RaspadOS was good but not what I was looking for and the TwisterOS is an amazing OS but it didn't work as well with the touchscreen as I wanted. A couple OS's later and I found a youtube video talking about running android on a raspberry pi, Perfect! I looked it up and LineageOS is not supported on the raspberry pi 4 but it does work. I flashed another sd card and stuck it in the tablet and it worked, kinda. The OS was there but there was no apps and no store. Another youtube video later and I found you have to restore the play store using your google account by uploading a file to the tablets local storage and doing a restore to it. Luckily I have USB ports so this process was easy and after a reboot I had the play store.

With the play store running I was able to download multiple apps and emulators which allowed me to play both new and old school games. And yes, if you haven't noticed, this is no longer for my kid, this tablet is for me. She got an Amazon tablet. I have been enjoying playing some GBC and GBA games with a usb controller, listening to Pandora at my desk, as well as playing some online MMOs. Another great thing about the tablet is if I did want to run TwisterOS or another OS I just have to pull out the current LineageOS sd card and put in another.