A Pocket-Sized Terminal?

Cloud servers, Raspberry Pis, smart home controllers, Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers… the list of network-connected devices a hardware hacker has to manage goes on and on. For routine tasks like starting a service, updating code, or making configuration changes, the most common way to connect to a remote machine (whether it is across the room or across the world) is via SSH. In this way, the user can get a text-based terminal prompt that lets them work with the machine as if they were sitting in front of it.

Sitting down at a traditional computer isn’t always the most convenient way to access another machine via SSH, especially if one happens to be on the road at the time. So for cases like these, YouTuber That Project’s latest hack could be the ideal solution. That Project has developed a portable SSH terminal client for the LILYGO T-Deck Plus. This provides a BlackBerry-like experience for accessing all the things from wherever you happen to be.

The T-Deck Plus is an ESP32-S3-based handheld device with a physical BlackBerry-style keyboard and trackball. It also has a 2.8-inch touchscreen display and Wi-Fi connectivity. Perhaps most important of all, it is hackable. It can be programmed using Arduino, PlatformIO IDE, or MicroPython, and that is just what That Project did. He created an application called PocketSSH that does exactly what it sounds like: it puts an SSH client in your pocket.

Essentially, That Project simply wrote a user interface to wrap around libssh2. That interface was carefully thought out, however. It uses a trackball to recall recently typed commands from the shell history to minimize typing. It also leverages the touchscreen to speed up scrolling, which is a nice feature with such a small display.

The full source code of PocketSSH has been made available on GitHub.