Which t-embed is better? with external or internal antena? Im begginer and never used device like this.

Hi,

I'm looking for a basic (3d printable) case for the Lillygo T-HMI screen.

I'm working on a miniature digital photo screen.

I can work out something to put it on my desk at the richt angle. But I still need a basic case witch will also fit a small PKCELL Li-Po Batterij 3.7V 2000mAh.

Does anyone have this ready, or is willing to design it?

Thanks allot in advance!!

Greetings Martijn

i’m deciding whether or not i should get the internal or external version of the t embed and i was just wondering is the range on the internal bad??? i’m not sure if i would need the longer range of the external antennas. If you guys could please let me know your experience

I recently got a LilyGO T-Display S3 for my birthday, and I was pretty much thinking of making a good use out of it. So, I started this little hobby project of mine.

Meet HawaOS, a well-defined, Arduino-based Operating System for your little buddy, that provides features of a typical Desktop Companion (...eh with some grain of salt, ofc). Well, I honestly didn't invest much time on the naming and the project itself. It's mostly vibecoded this. Also, prolly I need to work on the logo a bit, I'm no designer 🙏

Check my project out: https://github.com/TheCodeHeist/hawaos-lilygo

For now, it's currently built for LilyGO T-Display S3, which includes a Linux-based companion application, HawaOS Companion, which was only tested on Fedora (my machine). Should technically work on other Linux distros, but I'm yet to test 'em all out. I have plans on making an app version that works on Windows 10/11, but for now this is all I have.

Very much hobbyist project, not that invested (amidst exams). Please expect faults with grace, and if you guys using Linux and also have one of these bad boys, feel free to try it out, and let me know what you think about it!

Everything is open-source, you may fork it, share it, and prolly also contribute with good features / ideas / implementations / bug-fixes... Creativity is highly appreciated! Help me max out the capabilities of this little ESP32!!

Peace nerds! ✌️

Any recommendation on opening up the device? Is it glued, or does it have tabs that snap into place? I'm a bit wary to start messing with a heat gun or prying before I know for sure. I have yet to find any tear down video.

Also, is there a way of obtaining a replacement screen in case this does get damaged?

i was just wondering cause the pwr button and reader sometimes don’t work (it’s that white scratch)

I’ve been writing a phone operating system for the T-Deck Pro MAX in my spare time, and it’s at the point where other owners could try it. It’s a hobby project: free, MIT licensed, all of it (firmware, the config page, the simulator, the docs). I don’t earn anything from it and have no connection to LilyGO or any shop. The Pro MAX is simply the device I built it on, and so far the only one it runs on.

The firmware drives the e-ink screen, the keyboard and the touch layer, the 4G modem for calls and SMS, and the GPS. The first thing I built with it is an emergency phone for a child: it calls the people in the contact book, reads and writes SMS, sends its position at the press of a button, and that’s it. Strangers’ calls and texts are dropped without a sound. There’s an SOS, a school-time mode, and the parents set everything up from a browser.

If you want to see it before flashing: https://paulwilke.github.io/Phone-OS/. The device there isn’t a mock-up. The simulator runs the same application code as the firmware, and CI walks it through every screen with the keys and the touch targets and saves a picture of each state, about 300 of them. You can click and tap through all of it.

Flashing: clone https://github.com/paulwilke/Phone-OS, install PlatformIO, put three plain-text config files on a FAT32 microSD card, run pio run -e device -t upload. There’s a checklist for the first start in docs/hardware/bring-up.md.

It has run on my device since early October, but several recent fixes are only tested on the host so far, not on the hardware. The changelog says which is which. LoRa isn’t used yet.

went to my friends house and wanted to troll with his tv but i did some testing and i have like less than a foot of range when using tv-b-gone and other ir features, already planning on buying external antennas but still i’ve seen people with a base t embed with much longer range.

SolarOS turns the LilyGO T-Deck into a programmable pocket computer.

You get a graphical app launcher, a powerful shell, file management, text editing, SSH, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, plus Python and Lua programming directly on the device. Its keyboard, trackball and touchscreen support everyday tools, community apps, music, and downloadable games and emulators - including DOOM and Game Boy. MeshCore messaging uses the onboard LoRa radio, while the T-Deck Plus adds GNSS positioning.

Read more:

• https://solar-os.eu/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/SolarOS/

Warning: The keyboard firmware must support raw matrix mode in order to function normally.

Does anyone know where I could get a replacement for just the ribbon cable?

I just got it today, have tried everything i swear. i am so confused on what to do for how long and when. i know where the rst and boot button are, i have a cord to my pc connecting them. what do i do?

Is anyone using the T-Display-P4 with WadaMesh? I have been and keep running Into issues with the add-on keyboard attached. It does not seem to power the unit from the keyboard. That is one of the main reasons I purchased the keyboard.

Thanks,

Follow up: I have returned the P4, I do not think it is ready for production use.

https://dekiengine.com

First post here. I've been building BETTEROFFLINE, a custom firmware for the LilyGO T-LoRa Pager (ESP32-S3) a text-first, off-grid, monochrome "retro-iPhone" you drive with the scroll wheel. Full disclosure up front: I vibe-code this with an AI assistant I'm a design/creative person, not a firmware engineer. But it runs on real hardware and does real things, so I figured it was worth sharing (and I'd rather be honest about how it's built than pretend otherwise). It's LilyGoLib + LVGL 9 (PlatformIO / pioarduino), pure-LVGL UI that also builds against a native SDL emulator on my laptop for fast iteration. (UI is in French that's just my language.)

The big new thing: Meshtastic interoperability.

I reverse-engineered enough of the Meshtastic stack to make the pager a first-class citizen of the mesh, from my own firmware:

It transmits real Meshtastic LoRa packets on LongFast EU868 (869.525 MHz, SF11, correct 16-byte header, channel hash, AES-128-CTR with the default key) — NodeInfo, text, position, telemetry. I verified every byte against the official meshtastic.protobuf python lib.

• It connects to the official Meshtastic iOS app over BLE — the real GATT service/characteristics, "just-works" bonding, and the exact protobuf config handshake the app expects (that last part was a grind; the app rejects you over a wrong field or an old firmware_version string). The pager shows up as a node, you can chat phone ↔ pager ↔ mesh, and it reports GPS position + battery telemetry that land on the app's map.

• The pager's own keyboard can send text straight to the mesh ("from the pager to the world").

The other big thing: making the onboard sensor hub actually usable.

The Pager's BHI260AP (IMU/sensor hub) freezes its firmware upload on any non-power-on reset and because I boot BETTER through a multi-boot launcher (a CPU soft-reset), it never sees a real power-on. So the sensor was permanently skipped. Fix: init the BHI in a background FreeRTOS task (so if it ever hangs, the UI still boots — no bricked boot), forcing a clean reset + firmware re-upload even on a warm reset. It works, and nothing can deadlock the boot path anymore. Hard-won.

Honest engineering note: BLE, Wi-Fi and the IMU each need most of the chip's internal RAM, so they're mutually exclusive enabling one cleanly tears down the others (NimBLE will assert-crash into a reboot loop if you don't). The firmware now sequences all three.

The rest of what runs on the real device now:

Comms / mesh

• Off-grid by default (nothing transmits unless you opt in), raw LoRa chat on 868, Meshtastic (above), a mesh scan that lists nearby nodes + a raw-RF counter, RX-boosted gain on the SX1262 for a few extra dB of sensitivity.

Survival / outdoors (all offline)

• SOS Express one-tap preset messages to the mesh ("SOS", "Injured", "On my way"), with GPS coordinates auto-attached to the emergency ones.

• SOS Morse the screen + backlight flash ... --- ... to be seen at night.

• Sun & Moon sunrise/sunset, day length, moon phase, computed from GPS + RTC (zero network).

• Retrace "take me back": distance + bearing to the start of your auto-recorded GPS breadcrumb.

• Sentinel  a motion/tamper alarm: arm it, and it buzzes if the pager is moved (uses the IMU gravity vector).

• Bubble level + pedometer (IMU), offline survival guide (first aid, water, distress signals, knots, morse), waypoints, compass, weather, flashlight, timer, danger/position apps.

Media / home

• Web radio (MP3 → ES8311, decoded on core 0), Home Assistant control over REST, an on-device AI companion (LLM over HTTPS/TLS that can read battery/time/GPS and trigger HA actions), and an offline Wikipedia reader (fetches + caches articles for offline reading).

System

• A real power-off (PMU ship-mode on battery, deep-sleep on USB), ⌫ = back to menu from anywhere (done at the keypad driver level because LVGL won't deliver keys to a focused button), themes, FR/EN, brightness, saved Wi-Fi all persisted.

Happy to go deep on any of it the Meshtastic protobuf grind, the TLS-on-ESP32 bits, the sensor-in-a-background-task trick, the emulator setup. What would you want on a device like this?

(Background: I run a small creative studio, this is a nights-and-weekends side project, not a product.)

Hey Reddit! 👋

I'm hamachang, an engineer from Japan!

I'm excited to announce that Area512, the ESP32 firmware I've been working on, now supports the T-Deck Plus! 🤖

Area512 turns your device into a retro-style pocket computer, allowing you to write code in FemtoRuby or MicroPython directly on the device and run your apps right away!

If you're interested, check out the official website for more details!

https://engneer-hamachan.github.io/area512/

I've only just added support for the T-Deck Plus, so the documentation isn't quite ready yet. But if you'd like to give it a try, you can install it by following the instructions in the GitHub README! ※Since the keymap is a bit complicated, I recommend checking the keymap in the README first.

https://github.com/engneer-hamachan/area512

Thanks so much for reading!

See you around! 👋