27th September 2024 - Beepy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday I got a new toy. It is a Beepy! This is a handheld device 
with a Blackberry Q20 keyboard, screen and battery. The brains involve 
a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. While these are typically with a Sharp memory 
LCD, this is a colour Beepy. I bought it via a Discord channel thingy 
which felt dodgy but enough people seemed to have evidence of 
receiving something. Unfortunately the SQMFI original is on a waiting 
list. 

The device was bought mostly for SDF interfacing on the move. I am fed 
up with the mobile touch keyboard and Termux. For this purpose, the 
device seems great. The colour Beepy has a backlight which really 
helps. 

Set up was painful. I did receive a micro SD card set up but I tend to 
not trust these. There are instructions which make set up reasonably 
simple. It is mostly a case of installing some drivers and a few 
steps. Unfortunately I kept disabling the screen through updates. I am 
now very familiar with setting this up! There is an update which 
disables the screen and I don't know which. Annoying!

The keyboard on this is excellent. Some excellent thought went into 
mapping the keys. Control is the answer call button while the bacl key 
is escape. The drop call key is set to the tmux modifier key which is 
inspired. Additionally there is a meta mode activated by the 
Blackberry key. This mode is all about navigation and replicates arrow 
keys or brightness. It is all very logical and works well in vim and 
tmux. 

Would I recommend this? Probably not.It works for my SDF muck around 
plans but general use would be frustrating. The screen size is the 
main issue there. It would also be nice to use some thing with more OS 
options. The drivers force the use of Raspbian. Nothing terrible but a 
minor annoyance. I would love to run FreeBSD on this. 

Written a little slowly on the Beepy. Mostly as the punctuation and 
capitol letters involves extra button presses.