Neil Crawforth's VT2040 Is a Raspberry Pi RP2040-Powered Pocket-Sized Color Terminal
Designed for portability, this VT420-inspired terminal gets 18 hours from a set of three AA batteries.
Developer and embedded computing enthusiast Neil Crawforth has put together a portable battery-powered terminal designed for use with classic computers with a serial connection, dubbed the VT2040 — after the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller at its heart.
"[The VT2040 is a] portable serial terminal, based on an RP2040 dev board," Crawforth explains of his compact foldable, designed to slot into a pocket when not in use, "with a Gherkin keyboard and an ILI9488 480×320 LCD screen."
The gadget is built around a Waveshare RP2040 Zero, a more compact alternative to the popular Raspberry Pi Pico which pairs the same RP2040 dual-core microcontroller with 2MB of flash memory and a USB Type-C connector for power and programming. The board is connected to the ILI9488-based color display and the keyboard — a compact ortholinear layout using mechanical switches for a satisfying tactility.
To keep the portability intact, the compact terminal is powered by three AA batteries, good for around 18 hours of active use by Crawforth's reckoning. A physical power switch fully cuts all power to prevent drainage, though Crawforth warns that "there's nothing to prevent 5V being applied to the batteries when connected to USB, so turn off the switch to avoid damage."
The terminal itself is designed for use with TTL serial devices, and includes a slot into which an Espressif ESP-01 module can be installed — running, in Crawforth's demo, MicroPython, providing an interactive environment for on-the-go programming without the need for a host computer. For readability on the compact screen, Crawforth has also designed an anti-aliased bitmap font based on 6×13 pixel dimensions.
Crawforth's source code and build instructions are available on the project's GitHub repository under the permissive MIT license.