LILYGO's T-Deck Is an Espressif ESP32-S3-Powered BlackBerry-Like Handheld Dev Board
A familiar form factor packs in keyboard, trackball, touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and even optional LoRa connectivity.
Embedded electronics specialist LILYGO has launched a new all-in-one development board in a form factor familiar to any BlackBerry users: the Espressif ESP32-S3-powered T-Deck.
Designed for use in handheld projects, the LILYGO T-Deck combines the company's existing BlackBerry-style T-Keyboard input device with its own dedicated Espressif ESP32-C3, complete with compact trackball, with a full-color IPS 320×240 ST7789-based SPI touchscreen display. There's an amplified speaker on board and not one but two MEMS microphones — meaning it's functional as a communications device, if that's what you'd like to build, though the microphones are located to either side of the board rather than down where you'd speak if it were a cellular phone.
The rear of the gadget, brought to our attention by CNX Software, houses an Espressif ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 module — pre-dating the company's decision to move to processor cores built around the free and open-source RISC-V architecture and instead offering two Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores running at up to 240MHz, 512kB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM), and an additional 8MB of off-chip pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) plus 16MB of SPI flash storage expandable with microSD cards.
For connectivity, Espressif's module offers Wi-Fi 4 single-board 2.4GHz connectivity along with Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE), with LILYGO also offering an optional LoRa transceiver module built on Semtech's SX1262 for low-power long-range communications. There's a USB Type-C port for power and data, plus a four-pin UART Grove connector for expansion. There's also a connector for a lithium-polymer battery, complete with on-board charging circuit, though one is not supplied as standard.
The T-Deck is now available to order on the official LILYGO store at $42.66; adding the LoRa transceiver ups the price to $50.48. Schematics, a 3D-printable case design, binary-blob firmware, and code examples published under the permissive MIT license are available on the project's GitHub repository.