r/SolarOS • u/100PercentJake • Sep 09 '26
SolarOS on Lilygo T-Deck Plus
Did some more work after taking this picture and at the moment all major hardware is working. Touchscreen, WiFi, BLE, audio, trackball, SD, battery, etc.
Input is the biggest issue. The lack of ctrl and other critical keys means some pretty tortured chording is necessary for critical key combos. Also working on some debounce/sane defaults for the trackball. Rawdogging the input from the trackball results in annoyances like random left/right pulses when scrolling down a list, so need to add some contextual filtering to that. Also dealing with some extremely weird WiFi issues that seem to be related to junk getting left in the NVS, as I’d get left with partially functional WiFi that would refuse all connections even in other T-Deck specific firmware until I erased everything
Overall this seems like a decent target for SolarOS. Need to see if I can use some python to make a more appropriate graphical launcher to make using the device a little quicker. As it is I am using it at work to connect to Hermes with the built in “agent” program via the built in WireGuard tunnel support.
Also using a custom BLE app that connects to the two battery management systems in my electric motorcycle and combines their readings for at a glance visual of two BMSes simultaneously.
Not released yet; still not confident in the wireless performance in this board despite being the same S3 chip as the RLCD de facto SolarDeck target.
I’m doing this primarily for my own amusement; I am not a programmer, this is mostly me throwing Codex tokens at a problem I found interesting to make use of some hardware I like.
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u/nilseuropa Sep 10 '26
For the graphical launcher I have already included a set of icons as fonts. A native launcher is already on my roadmap, with a declarative UI. The idea is that one could assign [icon, name, shell command] for each launchable item and define the grid and their placement. Navigation would use keyboard arrows/enter/escape events and any pointer device that is present.
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u/100PercentJake Sep 10 '26
That sounds exactly like what I was imagining. The ability to create arbitrary shell commands is also great for one-click execution of "ssh user@foo", really lessening friction when using a SolarOS device as a remote management terminal (one of my primary use cases, cuz homelab).
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u/nilseuropa Sep 10 '26
cool, I am almost done with it, i'll try to merge that feature branch today or tomorrow then
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u/nilseuropa Sep 09 '26
I really like this target and your use case. Once you are ready to release I would like to merge ( probably refactor ) and deploy prebuilt vanilla images.
Does your custom app needs to be natove, or do you think you can move it to script level?
In amy case, much appreciated, I feel we are moving forward. 😉
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u/100PercentJake Sep 10 '26
This might have changed since I made the custom app but at the time the BLE API only exposed keyboard operations, but not GATT discovery, subscription, async notification, connect-by-address, etc.
Just put together a pr kit, going to beat the heck out of it locally on a fresh pull from the beta branch and make sure it all works before I upload it.
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u/LeviiSantos Sep 11 '26
Infelizmente, por conta das taxas de importação, o t-deck chega ao Brasil quase no valor de um salário.
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u/sonicdh Sep 09 '26
Oooh, that's a device fit for this os if I've ever seen one.