Posted by kristianpaul 9/8/2025
And while you can work around that with an adapter it takes away from the simplicity of just plugging in the glasses ( and most of them get quite hot too).
Few years ago I wanted to build one as a hobby/toy project with parts that are more or less easily available. So I did [0]. Instead of using a pre-made keyboard I used simple push buttons and instead of specialized keyboard controller I used an Atmega328P. Most of the components are through-hole and easy to solder. Anyway, the couple of the handhelds I built are sitting in a drawer at home, but it was fun building it nevertheless.
[0] - https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/111/119/5...
It's much better for extended typing than a screen keyboard or blackberry keyboard. For non-extended typing, the blackberry keyboard is a small enough improvement on the screen keyboard to not be worth permanently dedicating space to it.
Just make the tablet battery swappable and sign me up :).
It does cover the use cases I wan't from a linux hand held up to a point. If I could dock it to have a real monitor when I'm not on the go it would be perfect. Maybe through a usb-c output ? Just so I don't have to fiddle with multiple usb/hdmi cables when I want to set up
Some with Lora.
I heard somewhere those spare part Bb keyboards have basically dried up.
At this point, and at these prices, there are very specific use-cases for esp32-based devices, and they are mostly all single-use devices (i.e. capture then process some video, caching it then transmitting it for remote storage is one use-case I have seen in the wild).
An rpi device is much more general.
They use the EG25 cellular modem <https://www.digikey.pl/en/products/detail/quectel/EG25GGB-25...>, the same one that is used in PinePhone devices
If I had a 3D printer I’d build this one for sure. Or the 3D printer would sit in my junk corner. One or the other.
neat product but what a garbage company that was
For about 5 years before Android/IPhone, I used a nokia phone that opened with the screen in the middle of a split querty keyboard on the phone... that thing was perfect for notes/text. I really wouldn't mind something like that or even this device as long as the text could be set to something reasonable for my poor vision to use. I have to max out my accessibility/text settings on android and that's a stretch at times (also exposes so main UI failings).
I would shove any other cm5 compatible device into this than the actual cm5.
It has no h264 encoder or decoder or other encoders or decoders.
I know this from watching lots of people try to use it on 3d printers and discovering that their camera streams now take tons of CPU[1] after "upgrading" from a pi 4b to a cm5.
In any case, from just about any perspective, you are better off shoving a rockchip based cm5 compatible board in this.
[1] the commonly-used logitech cameras used to do h264 streams, but they removed the h264 encoder chips in all of their models a few years back, without changing any of the model numbers. All the current ones are like yuvy420 at 5fps or mjpeg at 30fps. Even for something like the mx brio. But for things like the c920,if they are old enough, they do h264, and if they are new, they don't.
[0] https://github.com/TheMediocritist/beepy_rp2040
[1] https://blog.beeper.com/2023/05/16/beeper-x-sqmfi-beepberry/
[2] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/546865-REG/Logitech_9...
