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A little while back I acquired this little handheld device kit called the Beepy. If you want to read a little bit more about what it is I'll link my initial post about it below. It is a little handheld that uses a blackberry keyboard, a monochrome reflective lcd and accepts a Pi Zero form factor board as the brains.
First Impressions of the Beepy Pocket Computer
At first I just fiddled around with it, not doing much of any substance. This was primarily because it comes as just a PCB and thus is pretty fragile without anything holding it together and protecting all the bits. Well now I have a 3D printed case for it so I can use it more intensively without worrying about breaking it, yay! Now that I can use it more I have been working on setting it up kind of like a PDA from days of yore with some useful simple programs. At first I was using a Pi Zero W that I already had and wasn't being used for anything. After doing that for a few days I have decided to switch it out for the earlier Pi Zero (without the W) configured to launch to a terminal running a customized tmux interface and menu that launches a few small command line programs that work offline. A calculator/unit converter called qalc, a notes program called notes, a calendar program called when, and of course my favorite gemini client (but oh so much more) offpunk.
Since this is a Pi 0 without any built-in networking I am using a usb ethernet adapter to periodically run a hotsync script to download new things for reading. The hotsync script is currently just running 'offpunk --sync' but I plan to add some other things over time. I found a nice little weather forecast script that is adapted nicely to the Beepy display that I need to work out modifying to function with cached data that is pulled down during my hotsync. I may put email on here too but I'm not sure about that yet.
I'm writing this very post on the Beepy. The first few paragraphs were written on Beepy's keyboard and now I am writing the rest with a mechanical keyboard plugged into it with a micro USB adapter. This is working quite nicely.
Beepy PDA typing this post with a mechanical keyboard
Beepy PDA browsing gemini with offpunk and showing a custom launcher menu
I quite like the Beepy so far and I hope it can be something I use pretty regularly. I love the sunlight readable display and the blackberry keyboard is really nice to type on for a thumb keyboard. I have a similar keyboard on my smartphone (Unihertz Titan Pocket) and I definitely prefer the one on the Beepy. The Beepy keyboard firmware is very nicely done and makes it easy to get to everything you need and just generally is well thought out.
The main criticism I have so far is more directed at the Pi than the Beepy itself. I have not conducted a real battery life test yet but it seems that the battery life is going to be not great. The Pi 0 has about the lowest power consumption of any similar SBC but Pis in general (and actually most SBCs really) don't support suspend. The battery life could be pretty dang good if you could suspend it while it's in your pocket not doing anything.
Since Pis supporting suspend is likely to never happen I am hoping another SBC may eventually. The most interesting Pi alternative I have found for my particular use case is the MangoPi MQ Pro. It has the same form factor as the Pi Zero but has the following key differences:
I'm not so much concerned about the RAM. As I write this the Beepy is using a grand total of 44MB of RAM. The USB C ports would be a nice convenience upgrade. The RISC V CPU is a question mark at this point but my hope is that the more open architecture leads to a functioning suspend at some point. But even without suspend the MQ Pro is a bit more power efficient than the Pi 0. If the Beepy hardware can be made to work with the MQ Pro that would still be a win. I have one on order so I'll be giving that a go in the future.
More thoughts on this to come in the future. The whole paradigm of a PDA is very appealing to me and this a promising avenue towards reintroducing a device like that with some more modern and flexible attributes back into my daily technology usage.
