Lilygo T-Keyboard: An ESP32 Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

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 don't even get a datasheet.

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 last few months. I have a book to edit and a newborn that is always sleeping on my chest. I tried a few bluetooth keyboards from Amazon but they were all garbage.

Eventually I found the T-Keyboard and have been really pleased by it. This is the keyboard from the T-Deck with a little 160x40 screen attached to it. The screen allows you to see what you're typing on the device without looking at your phone. It boots in half a second which means switching back and forth is lightning fast. If I'm typing a few words, I stick to my touchscreen. I'm editing so there's a lot of selecting text to copy / paste / annotate which is also touchscreen work. When I need to add a new paragraph or more, I set my phone down and pick this thing up to type with.

It really is fantastic. If you decide to pick one up, you may want to run my fork which fixes a bunch of the usability issues: https://github.com/zenkalia/T-keyboard/tree/bleeding_edge

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.

Even if this keyboard is as good as a real BB back in the golden years using it on an iPhone is a mess. BBin the golden years was fully optimized for operating with a keyboard.

iPhone is optimized for being a touch screen driven system. Those conflict.

I tried for a good time to develop something very similar years ago, but 1) I wasn't able to find financing and 2) (more importantly) trying to write a UI Shell for Android that worked like the original BB was perhaps not impossible, but way past my and the people with me skill level.

Now what we need is to find an Android device that can run the classic BB software. (Yeah they made their own Android BB, but it sucked)

lilygo has been killing it for a while now with great small embedded devices.

The keyboard plus ultra small typing screen is a super neat idea.

I do wish the key card here also had the pointer pad too, but still a great offering. seen a bunch of these but usually without case, and the price here (<$19) is pretty fine.

This post also is a sad reminder that I haven't used or been even semi fluent in my Twiddler for nearing a decade now. Now that was the ideal ubiquitous computer keyboard, if you can overcome the arduous learning curve.

I can’t see carrying one of these for use with a phone/tablet (at least not with this version’s chunkiness) but something like this with a trackpoint added would make a great companion for a home theater PC. Even better if it had multi-pairing so it could switch between a PC, console, streaming box, etc.

Currently am using a Lenovo ThinkPad Keyboard II for this purpose which is pretty good (dual RF/BT modes let me switch between devices, trackpoint is better than the chintzy integrated trackpads in most couch-keyboards), but something that takes up less coffee table space and is more like a remote would be even better.

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.

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!

So many amazing little devices like this! I hope we get a proper OS and app management system for this class of device eventually, they could have some really cool applications especially as remote controls.

I would be really into a phone with the double-tap keyboard and rocker of the Blackberry 7100, maybe adding the trackball.

Someone make an E7 type case with a slide under keyboard for Android/USB-C on the bottom right side.

Cute but useless. I am fine using my cellphone.

keep seeing mechanical keyboard addons for phones... are we finally going in the right direction (until they figure out something better)?