What it runs on
Built for the LilyGo T-Lora Pager. A keyboard, a wheel, a real screen and a battery, in something that fits in a pocket.
The board
- MCU
- ESP32-S3, with PSRAM
- Display
- 480 × 222 colour
- Input
- QWERTY keyboard and a clickable scroll wheel
- Radio
- LoRa, sub-GHz
- Also
- GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, microSD, speaker, vibration motor, fuel gauge
Pagers ship with one of two LoRa chips. The installer handles both; nothing to pick.
What the firmware does with it
Most of the work went into the parts a generic build leaves on the table: the fuel gauge and charger are configured so the percentage is real, the vibration motor is driven as the ERM it actually is, NFC is wired up for sharing contacts, the SD card holds map tiles and backups, and the speaker gets per-theme sounds. The wheel is read by a hardware counter, so fast scrolling doesn't lose clicks.
Getting one
Sold by LilyGo directly and through the usual resellers. Buy the version for your region's band — 915 MHz in North America, 868 MHz in Europe. Add a microSD card; the firmware uses it for offline maps and for the backups that bring your contacts back after a fresh install.
Other boards
The mesh half of this is MeshCore, which runs on plenty of hardware. The half that is ours — the interface, themes, maps, battery work — assumes this screen, this keyboard and this wheel. A port to another board with a display and buttons is realistic work rather than a rewrite, and the layout constants and input handling are where you would start. It is GPL-3.0; the source is right there.
Have the pager already?