LILYGO's T-Deck Pro Is a LoRa- and 4G-Capable Smartphone-Like All-In-One ePaper Dev System
LILYGO's T-Deck Pro Is a LoRa- and 4G-Capable Smartphone-Like All-In-One ePaper Dev System
Wish BlackBerry had discovered LoRa transceivers and electrophoretic displays? Try the T-Deck Pro.
Unfortunately it's sold out. In fact it was only available for a very small amount of time.
Aww dang. I was holding off on getting a T-Deck until Mestastic 2.6 dropped, and would've really preferred an E-Ink version.
How long does it normally take them to restock?
I have absolutely no idea what I'd do with this but I want one.
it is for digital preppers.
IF starlink,3/4/5g,home wifi and everything else is dead...THEN LoRa is your toy.
other than that it might be for the bizarre idea of wizards go hiking or do outside activity. so thats why they produced to few...the story of nerds being outdoors was too unrealistic and prepper incels are just poor.
Run meshtastic on it
Meh, I already have an ESP32 meshtastic device and that thing chews through the 3000mah battery I have connected. I don't need another power hungry ESP32.
ESP32 can be extremely power efficient but it is a lot of work to throttle them down and get the various sleep modes working right
Can it run Linux?
My limited research says yes.
This is cool, but how much was it?
From TFA:
$92.64 for the A7682E 4G-capable version and $81.79 for the PCM5102A version
Oh, that's quite cheap! I was afraid it was going to be one of those "cool indie tech" products that costs hundreds of dollars and makes no sense for the consumer except as a cool gimmick. If they can make them a bit cheaper through mass production, this might actually be an alternative.
Dude that is so sick...
Someone please make this into a functioning phone...
Minimal has something similar, but it's unfortunately huge.
I like tha it runs Android, I wish it was the size of this LILYGO device.
Mudita also has something similar but it's $335.
Given that the Meshtastic team just released a fancy new color UI that they spent about a year on, I'm not sure who this is for, unless someone wants to reskin that UI to work on this monochrome display.
ha, of course my t-deck plus just arrived today...
Nice I guess, it adds 4g to the older T-deck. I guess with a SIP client app you could use it as a voice phone. The processor is an ESP32-S3 which has wifi and BLE though the Lilygo article doesn't mention either of those. I almost bought a used T-deck last year but figured it was another thing I didn't have a real use for.
I'd like to see a receive-only POCSAG pager built into a thing like this. I don't know to what extent 1-way pager services still exist in the US, but the idea is that it's a system that sends text messages in the SCA subcarrier of FM broadcast radio stations or sometimes other classes of transmitter. It has mostly been displaced now by cellular phones, but some people like doctors on call still use it, as it is supposed to be more reliable, plus the FM signal penetrates buildings better than cell signals do.
For me though, the main idea is privacy. It is receive-only, so there is no always-on connection sending your location anywhere. People can send you a text and if you're in the coverage area of the FM station, you receive it and can call the person back (in the old days, by finding a landline phone) or whatever. Some of the more expensive plans had regional or nationwide coverage, by broadcasting the message on a whole network of FM stations.
POCSAG itself is a digital protocol for which many software implementations exist, and it doesn't look too hard to write one. So the main challenge is having an RF receiver in the T-deck that gets a frequency where there is a pager service operating in your area.
I don't understand the attraction of small slow epaper displays. I'm fine with regular displays in a thing this size. I'd like to have a 13+ inch epaper tablet but no FOSS ones exist right now afaik.
If only they had a basic dim backlight...