> There are dual speakers on board, it is needed to pair with the bluetooth audio module to make sound

This is cursed

For real. For the kind of sound I'd expect out of this, the pwm channels on the rpi work just fine. If you want better sound, the rpi supports i2s.

> As we know, it's always been somehow difficult or tricky to add sound for RaspberryPi. Some use gpio to generate pwm to make sound for speakers, some use I2S audio module to generate sound for speakers. But they all have some shortcomings. PWM generated from gpios on raspberryPi have much noise that make the speakers nealy usable, and I2S audio module will occupy the very precious gpio resoureces(usually take 3 gpio pins). And in some operating system there is no driver for these pwm or I2S audio module. Due to the reasons above this is how I solve the sound problem. [1]

[1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5/tree/main/Speake...

The design artifacts are released with a liberal license, it shouldn't be TOO hard to fix that. Though I've never worked with SPI or I2S sound chips before.

Oh, not that CM5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

If you don't specifically want the Blackberry keyboard, there's also https://www.clockworkpi.com/home-uconsole

This also supports Radxa CM5 which is twice as powerful/watt as the Raspberry CM5.

Though you'll need USB hub for internet (WiFi/Eth adapter) and audio.

Also shipping takes a few months, which is kinda scary when you don't know the tariffs that far in advance.

I got the Hackberry Pi Zero from Elecrow recently and it has been excellent for playing around. I really miss real keyboards on mobile devices and it has been fulfilling to use it.

Same. The zero has only 512MB RAM so I started projects to rebuild the original BB OS for this while also adding Xpra to stream a browser running on a remote server (they all require 1GB+). Then priorities hit and I have not been back on this project since.

Lilygo has a number of devices based on the same keyboard but esp32 MCU.

Some with Lora.

https://lilygo.cc/collections/lora-or-gps

Those devices use the older style BB keyboard, the one with the trackball. The Beepy from SQFMI is another Raspberry Pi platform with the trackpad keyboard.

An interesting alternative to the SQFMI Beepy / Beepberry [0][1] which is just a rpi zero but has a Sharp Memory Pixel display that I love. Both could use some work on adapting the UI to the little blackberry touchpad. Neither using a mouse cursor nor meta/ctrl modifier combos are very ergonomic on these little handhelds.

[0] https://beepy.sqfmi.com/

[1] https://blog.beeper.com/2023/05/16/beeper-x-sqmfi-beepberry/

I've been playing with the Beepy. So much potential, but the community around it never sprung up, and the developer has moved on.

For me it was a cool little terminal that mostly didn't work outside my usual hotspot. Managing WiFi on a Pi from the terminal is no fun.

That's adorable, but the censored/pixelated keyboard is a little offputting. Am I guessing right that they're using Blackberry overstock and censoring trademarks?

Yeah, it was also rebranded from "Beepberry" to "Beepy" because RIMs lawyers had nothing better to do than rush to the defence of a long-dead brand apparently.

The company is just called Blackberry now. They rebranded sometime around 2013.

Oh LOL I didn't even notice that on the first link, yeah I guess they're just obscuring it for the logo. IRL it is a non pixelated keyboard xD

FWIW the project hit a wall and they didn't deliver the quantity they planned on, I ended up buying one on ebay for an extortionate cost (but buying rare electronics scratches an itch for me) - digging in the discords lead to discover an offshoot project that made some progress at a recent chaos comms congress, called Beepis

https://bbkb-community.github.io/computers/beepis/

Would ge possible to install a small Clipper LTE 4G Breakout (SP/CE) into this design? For instance, there is this one which seem small enough to fit in the case (if adaptions): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/clipper-breakout?variant=...

Can I add a 4G/5G modem to this? If so, that would be perfect!

It’s $168 plus the cost of a CM5; while it is cool, I would worry that the $200+ device would end up in a drawer…

I suspect an awful lot of us have a mausoleum of abandoned projects where this would feel right at home and is probably downright budget friendly compared to some of the other residents interred there.

The drawer that holds my Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and clones thereof is dangerously overpopulated as it is, but I think I've finally learned my lesson: Now I always have a cooling off period of hours after putting something in an online shopping cart before I click "buy" to see if my interest was just a passing one (usually the case).

I was looking at $400 modded iPod Classics this morning and my better judgement avoided a new member of the "neat projects" drawer.

What do you mean - I will get back to that project some year. It hasn't been touched in 15, but I'm still going to get back to it - sometimes around my 2700th birthday most likely (I'm trusting someone else will advance medicine such that I live that long)

Mausoleum sounds way more dignified than my junk drawers of half done projects!

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.

Hey, you gotta send these things off with some dignity - it’s not their fault I’ve got ADHD and poor impulse control.

my Pocket C.H.I.P. wants a friend

neat product but what a garbage company that was

it's cheaper than the flipper zero. Something i have found i mostly don't use apart from keeping a copy of my apartment card.

Yeah... for me, my vision is rather deteriorated, just looking at the size of things in the screenshots I can tell I'd have trouble using it. I can't even use the Steam Deck for that reason. At least my daughter and SO get use out of it.

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).

The CM5 also doesn't have hardware video decoding, making it weird for a handheld device.

I would shove any other cm5 compatible device into this than the actual cm5.

I don't know about other formats, but the CM5 specs sheet says "4K60 HEVC decoder".

Yes, you are correct. It has a 4k60 HEVC decoder, i forgot about that.

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.

You could let eBay be your junk drawer.

This is the future i wanted in the 90s.

I like it.

In the HackberryPi CM5, does that pointing device (which IIUC is repurposed from Blackberry hardware) work like a joystick/TrackPoint?

Can you move smoothly at all angles with it, well enough to use the desktop GUI?

Yes. I tried to find a good video showing it, this one from the same creator shows it being used as a mouse and you can see it works pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568L-P2tBwc

Thanks for finding that. Nice. Starting at 14s in the video, looks like it's doing both coarse and fine movement. I don't know whether it would have to calibrated for best balance on the tiny display, but looks like it will probably work pretty well.

Is it possible to buy a standalone Blackberry USB keyboard? zitaotech store has been out of stock for months.

There is a chip that can control keyboards with I2C interface, the ADP5587, handles all the delicacies of button pressing:

https://www.analog.com/en/products/adp5587.html

Nice. there's also a project [0] that uses the RP2040 to talk I2C and present it as USB HID, created in service of the beepberry [1]. Now that I think of it tho this could be made into a very miniature home theater PC remote, a la the Logitech DiNovo

[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...