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Comment by gfaure | Hacker News Reader

This is the hardware that I wish Beepy had: https://beepy.sqfmi.com

By the way, does anyone know why all of these devices use the Arabic BlackBerry keyboard? Was there a particular surplus of this layout?

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I received a Beepy with a plain US keyboard but uneven keyboard backlighting. When I ordered a new Q10 keyboard from AliExpress, I got one that was left half Arabic/English and right half US-English. My T-deck came with the Arabic one. Seems like there are a lot of Arabic parts out there.

The Beepy is just as capable. The T-Deck is only serving as an interface to the Meshtastic LoRa node. A Beepy can run a Meshtastic companion app and connect over Bluetooth, just like the T-Deck.

Beepys have a pretty big issue with randomly shorting out due to a design flaw, according to the Discord forum anecdata. It happened to mine, unfortunately.

A very capable little device before it cooked itself, though—having a raspberry pi in your pocket is a lot of fun.

There is a fix for the U2 issue : https://beepy.space/t/shorted-tps61030-u2/21

Thank you for pointing this out. I had no idea. Seems like the kind of thing that all Beepy users should be made aware of.

But the backlit screen does make a difference in usability, one has to admit?

It is weird how the moment I saw the words 'mini keyboard' in the title I knew the exact keyboard module they were using, because it's the one everyone uses.

Depends on what was shipped to you. I have the USA keyboard, others had Non-Arabic, Non-English ones IIRC.

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