Beepberry is a Blackberry keyboard tinker toy from the founding father of Pebble

Are you a hacker who occurs to overlook their Blackberry? Seems to be like there’s a new product that’s simply your velocity: the “Beepberry.” It actually grafts the keyboard of a Blackberry Basic onto a pocketable customized board designed to suit a Raspberry Pi Zero W, all paired with a 400 x 240 “Reminiscence LCD” display screen that appears prefer it was ripped from an outdated graphing calculator — however is a little more subtle.

Beepberry is designed by Eric Migicovsky, founding father of the gone-but-not-forgotten Pebble smartwatch and extra relevantly co-founder of Beeper: the hacky all-in-one messenging app that stuffs each service from WhatsApp to iMessage (utilizing a jailbroken iPhone) into one place.

The system is ostensibly designed to run Beeper with out another on-line distractions, however Migicovsky is aware of what you’re pondering: he additionally describes Beepberry as a conveyable “e-paper” laptop for hackers.

In case you’re questioning about that “e-paper” display screen, it’s not technically e-ink — however it’s an LCD made by Sharp with a one-bit reminiscence circuit embedded in every pixel for e-ink-like picture retention.

For $79 you get the Beepberry, mounting screws, and a 2,000mAh battery — though you’ll should discover a option to maintain the battery in place. (In some demos, the creators are actually utilizing a rubber-band.) Along with the two.7-inch display screen and Blackberry Basic Q20 backlit keyboard, you get an USB-C port, a RGB LED, a aspect button, an influence change, and Basic Objective Enter / Output (GPIO) breakouts.

For $99, you can get a Beepberry kit that features a Pi Zero W preinstalled. In any other case, you’ll should deliver your personal or one other single-board laptop chip just like the Radxa Zero or MQ-Professional — which needs to be drag-and-drop for the reason that Beepberry has a solder-less header.

Notably, the Beepberry itself lacks any {hardware} for mobile knowledge connectivity, so it’s not fairly a self-contained beeper in the traditional sense. You’ll want to make use of Raspberry Pi’s built-in Wi-Fi, maybe hotspot it to a smartphone once you’re out and about, until you’re keen to plan a mobile add-on that plugs into its headers.

In case you’re excited by a Beepberry, you may need to act quick: there’s solely 50 initially out there to ship. You’ll must put in your order, after which fill out the Early Access Program form on the underside of the web page to allow them to know you need it now. The location doesn’t point out how most of the preliminary 50, if any, stay out there for buy.

It’s necessary to notice that the software program / firmware continues to be actively being developed and nothing is remaining, so don’t count on many out-of-box options if you happen to get your arms on one. In case you merely need one thing with an entire out-of-box expertise and a black and white display screen, a Playdate could also be extra your velocity. And if you happen to’re simply trying to assist the Pebble founder’s subsequent endeavor, you could possibly watch for his group’s upcoming Small Android Phone.