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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

#21

Post by photoGrant »

pomatic wrote: post #7
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…

Honestly, this isn't the case - at least in my experience - every product I've bought from them has come with a pinout diagram that is also duplicated on github. Sure, getting the hardware up and running is challenging, and sometimes the examples are a bit arcane or have weird omissions in terms of illustrating the device's capabilities, but it's a booster pack compared to designing and programming similar embedded h…

Honestly, it is -- I've a handful of devices and at least 2 needed debug level recovery of the firmware because of board revisions and pinouts for the same product being vastly different.

They should do better, but they're in a fun corner of the industry pushing out a half decent solution, so I accept.

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

#22

Post by oofoe »

unwind wrote: post #20

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!

Also check out the so-called M5 Cardputer, which is part of the M5Stack line of products. Has the colour display and super tiny keyboard, but also SD card, mic and speaker and battery. Plus... you can attach it to legos or fridges!

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

#23

Post by mkl »

KomoD wrote: post #17
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

Not in my experience. I have two different Bluetooth keyboards (and three non-Bluetooth wireless keyboards), none of which can operate wired. At least one of the non-Bluetooth ones can be used to get into BIOS though.

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

#24

Post by RockRobotRock »

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…

>layout only has shift on one side

Do people use right shift? Earnest question

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

#27

Post by Springtime »

I wonder if any of these DIY Blackberry keyboard products (or BB-like such as that recent Clicks case) have the capacitive touchpad feature that later Blackberry had, where you could use the surface of the keyboard itself as a touchpad for scrolling, tapping (without depressing any key), text selection, etc.

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

#28

Post by zenkalia »

Springtime wrote: post #27

I wonder if any of these DIY Blackberry keyboard products (or BB-like such as that recent Clicks case) have the capacitive touchpad feature that later Blackberry had, where you could use the surface of the keyboard itself as a touchpad for scrolling, tapping (without depressing any key), text selection, etc.

Not that I've seen. The Lilygo and BBQ20 keyboards all seem to use surplus Arabic BB keyboards that are made to be used with the little trackpad thing like on the tdeck.

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

#29

Post by lozaning »

zenkalia wrote: post #12
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.

Thankfully most everything lily-go throws on their boards is pretty generic and generally adafruit has an equivalent feather wing or some such, and you can use their documentation to figure out how to get your lily-go stuff working with a bit of time spent cross referencing schematics and code.

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

#30

Post by sowbug »

KomoD wrote: post #17
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

No. Hence my comment.
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