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Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

lilygo.cc

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Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#11

Post by kbar13 »

axegon_ wrote: post #5

Great but Lilygo should dedicate some of their efforts into writing documentation, even it it means dialing down the development of new products. I have several personal projects involving some Lilygo products and they are taking forever simply because I spent 95% of the time reverse engineering whatever examples they have and try to make some sense of what it is I'm actually holding in my hands. In most cases you do…

i have the same thought. they are really good at identifying market needs but their documentation is so lacking that it is more rewarding and only slightly slower to design and implement some of their less complicated modules yourself...

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#12

Post by zenkalia »

axegon_ wrote: post #5

Great but Lilygo should dedicate some of their efforts into writing documentation, even it it means dialing down the development of new products. I have several personal projects involving some Lilygo products and they are taking forever simply because I spent 95% of the time reverse engineering whatever examples they have and try to make some sense of what it is I'm actually holding in my hands. In most cases you do…

This is 100% true. The documentation isn't great. The code itself isn't great, either and it's the only thing you can go off of.

One thing Lilygo really should do is start merging pull requests. Many of them are fixing the documentation because we love tinkering with their devices and want to pave the way for others.

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#13

Post by zenkalia »

pomatic wrote: post #8
zenkalia wrote: post #2

After the deep discussions on the Lilygo T-Deck and the Clicks keyboard, I felt like this needed to be shared. I nearly built something like the Clicks for myself but the closer I got the worse it seemed, ergonomically. Not only that the Clicks key layout only has shift on one side and it doesn't have a backlight. Some background: I have been shopping around for a bluetooth keyboard to use for thumb typing for the la…

The problem I have with the blackberry keyboards is the omission of commonly used linux symbols such as tilde - how do you cope with that? Or perhaps I am missing a trick? I've resorted to salvaging Psion 5 keyboards and rolling my own hardware as the result.

I don't need a tilde but I could add one in about 5 minutes if needed. It would be something like this:

https://github.com/zenkalia/T-keyboard/blob/bleeding_edge/ex...

except it would add a ~ rather than trigger an arrow key. I'd likely put it on sym+q so that it is in a similar space to a real keyboard.

I was discussing special characters with someone on github. If the character isn't in the font you'll have to do some extra work that I summarized in this comment: https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/T-keyboard/issues/10#issue...

In the comment above it the mapping table that I'm talking about is this one: https://github.com/zenkalia/T-keyboard/blob/bleeding_edge/ex... .

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#14

Post by zenkalia »

WaxProlix wrote: post #4
zenkalia wrote: post #2

After the deep discussions on the Lilygo T-Deck and the Clicks keyboard, I felt like this needed to be shared. I nearly built something like the Clicks for myself but the closer I got the worse it seemed, ergonomically. Not only that the Clicks key layout only has shift on one side and it doesn't have a backlight. Some background: I have been shopping around for a bluetooth keyboard to use for thumb typing for the la…

> After the deep discussions on the Lilygo T-Deck and the Clicks keyboard Care to link those? I've been poking around some of this stuff and have a Lilygo T-Display and T-Embed en route, would be nice to see other more knowledgable folks' opinion on the products, dev experience, etc. (edit, there isnt much in a search for 'lilygo' so I surmise it's this fella https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38862848 )

That's the one! And this was the Clicks discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38871987

It's not very relevant to Lilygo tinkering but just a deep discussion of physical keyboards for phone use.

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#15

Post by comprev »

sowbug wrote: post #10

I know this is more of a hacker tool than an end-user product, but I wish more Bluetooth keyboards used their USB port not just to charge, but also to become a wired USB keyboard when plugged in. It's rare to need a wired keyboard, but it's nice for those times when you need to twiddle a BIOS setting or bootstrap a Bluetooth pairing flow.

The Apple Magic keyboard I have does this and thought it was a common feature of Bluetooth keyboards. Apparently not...

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#16

Post by zenkalia »

pomatic wrote: post #9
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #3

lilygo has been killing it for a while now with great small embedded devices. The keyboard plus ultra small typing screen is a super neat idea. I do wish the key card here also had the pointer pad too, but still a great offering. seen a bunch of these but usually without case, and the price here ( This post also is a sad reminder that I haven't used or been even semi fluent in my Twiddler for nearing a decade now. No…

Check out tindie - there is a solder party blackberry keyboard with a track pad. No display. If the display is important to you, then look at the TTGO-deck - a larger device but it has both keyboard & pointer.

These things have unfortunately been sold out for a while. Not only that, if I wanted to use the BBQ20 with my phone I'd have to connect it to a BLE chip and a battery which is way more hacking than I wanted to do on this project.

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#17

Post by KomoD »

sowbug wrote: post #10

I know this is more of a hacker tool than an end-user product, but I wish more Bluetooth keyboards used their USB port not just to charge, but also to become a wired USB keyboard when plugged in. It's rare to need a wired keyboard, but it's nice for those times when you need to twiddle a BIOS setting or bootstrap a Bluetooth pairing flow.

Isn't this super common? Pretty much every bluetooth keyboard I've had can do both wired and bluetooth

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#18

Post by zenkalia »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #3

lilygo has been killing it for a while now with great small embedded devices. The keyboard plus ultra small typing screen is a super neat idea. I do wish the key card here also had the pointer pad too, but still a great offering. seen a bunch of these but usually without case, and the price here ( This post also is a sad reminder that I haven't used or been even semi fluent in my Twiddler for nearing a decade now. No…

> overcome the arduous learning curve

Oh man. This reminds of the end of my developer career. I moved over to management because of awful RSI but in a desperate attempt to keep typing I learned the AlphaGrip. If I can master that thing, I can master anything!

http://www.alphagrip.com/

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#19

Post by jwells89 »

I can’t see carrying one of these for use with a phone/tablet (at least not with this version’s chunkiness) but something like this with a trackpoint added would make a great companion for a home theater PC. Even better if it had multi-pairing so it could switch between a PC, console, streaming box, etc.

Currently am using a Lenovo ThinkPad Keyboard II for this purpose which is pretty good (dual RF/BT modes let me switch between devices, trackpoint is better than the chintzy integrated trackpads in most couch-keyboards), but something that takes up less coffee table space and is more like a remote would be even better.

Re: Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

#20

Post by unwind »

Wow, that's cute! And it has a (weirdly written in the specs, but I'll reinterpret based on images) 160x40 color screen connected over 4-wire SPI. That means it can be fast, and having a full keyboard and a decent CPU means ... there will be games written for this. Cool!
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