Smart table with RPi

[oneill38]

Hi everyone,

I am currently facing some troubles in finding an OS for raspberry that could match my needs...
Few years ago, I built a coffee table :

table.jpg (225.85 KiB) Viewed 7920 times

Now the aquarium part has been replaced by a terrarium with plenty of cactus but nevermind, that's not really the point here. =)

Recently I added on the central area a screen connected to a raspberry Pi 3 B+ (Two actually...). I added also a tempered glass with a touch foil so that I can have touch control.
I would like now to find an OS that would behave as a phone or tablet, eventually with apps from Google store for example...
That's why I have just tried Lineage OS 15, but this is slow and laggy as hell, so I think I am just going to give up on this. Unless someone have some tricks to speed it up. (Would it work better on RPi 3 B instead of B+ ?)

I saw also that Emteria OS could be eventually fine for my application and it seems it's smoother than Lineage OS.
Could anyone give me some feedback about this or any other ideas that could help ?

Thanks a lot for your answers ! =)

(Once the project will be over, I would be glad to share some pictures !)

[DarkPlatinum]

The problem with android is that the Raspberry Pi runs out of memory doing simple tasks causing it to lock up. You could wait and hopefully the next pi comes with more than 1 GB ram. This would make android run a bit smoother (my predictions not actual facts). With emteria i usually add some swap so that some applications can still work.

[oneill38]

Hi,

Thanks for your answer.
Actually I was hoping that B+ realease would have more RAM already ^^'. (How disappointed I was ....)

I did not know that swapping was possible on Emteria. Actually I read that with Android it requires special kernel support to do it so I did not go further to see if it was really possible on Lineage OS.
If you have a method (link ?, description?) on how to do it, I'd be glad to hear it.

In any case, swapping on SD card is not ideal because they are slow ; maybe I would add an hard drive to put the swap partition on it...


Otherwise, from your point of view, which OS is better for this kind of projects ?

Thanks for your help.

[Konsta]

My LineageOS 15.1 build uses Google's SwiftShader software renderer so graphics performance is not that great. Bluetooth sort of works on the 3 B but that's the only difference to 3 B+. Graphics performance is better on LineageOS 14.1 but it also has its own set of issues. It doesn't support 3 B+ because of the kernel version used (https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpo ... stcount=16).

Actually the recommend way in Android is to use zRAM (https://source.android.com/devices/tech ... w-ram#zram). Last time I tried that with LineageOS 14.1 it performed poorly (it increases CPU usage and there might be some issues with shared GPU mem?). Kernels in my LineageOS builds already support swap and zram.

[oneill38]

Ok thanks for that feedback.

In the meantime I tried Emteria which runs android 7.1, and it is better.
I have still some problems with screen resolution and stuff but at least it runs a bit more smoothly. It's not that good with youtube vids though, so I fear a bit about basic games (haven't tried yet).
But from what I understood, zram is enable by default in Emteria so maybe the difference comes from there.

I think android and raspberry are not friends after all.

[oneill38]

Additional question :
On emteria, in the settings section, I can see that the total memory is 740 mb. Isn't that weird ?
I checked with a raspbian version, RPi is ok and the memory is 970 mb.

[DarkPlatinum]

Additional question :
On emteria, in the settings section, I can see that the total memory is 740 mb. Isn't that weird ?
I checked with a raspbian version, RPi is ok and the memory is 970 mb.

I think that it splits the rest of 260 mb of memory to the GPU to run graphics.

[oneill38]

Ok, it's probably that. I did not even think about it
Thanks

[aurely89]

Hi everyone,

I am currently facing some troubles in finding an OS for raspberry that could match my needs...
Few years ago, I built a coffee table :

table.jpg

Now the aquarium part has been replaced by a terrarium with plenty of cactus but nevermind, that's not really the point here. =)

Recently I added on the central area a screen connected to a raspberry Pi 3 B+ (Two actually...). I added also a tempered glass with a touch foil so that I can have touch control.
I would like now to find an OS that would behave as a phone or tablet, eventually with apps from Google store for example...
That's why I have just tried Lineage OS 15, but this is slow and laggy as hell, so I think I am just going to give up on this. Unless someone have some tricks to speed it up. (Would it work better on RPi 3 B instead of B+ ?)

I saw also that Emteria OS could be eventually fine for my application and it seems it's smoother than Lineage OS.
Could anyone give me some feedback about this or any other ideas that could help ?

Thanks a lot for your answers ! =)

(Once the project will be over, I would be glad to share some pictures !)

Hi oneill38, I know it's not that much in topic but, do you have any project of the acquarium/coffee table? I'm starting a project like that right now and it would be really useful to me.

Thank you!