handhelds hacks

442 Articles

Eenk Provides EInk, ESP32 Powered Text Adventures

August 27, 2026 by 15 Comments

There’s a niche genre of text adventure that’s halfway between a traditional novel and a videogame. Think Zork if it had an extra few novels worth of words of well-crafted story to go with the action. [t0mg] is a fan of such adventures, and also quite enjoys carrying around his palm-sized ESP32 powered Xteink e-ink reader, so decided to create a project to merge the two interests, called eeink.

The Xteink readers have gotten popular lately because their modest internals and size make them very affordable. Not to mention hackable, since they’re basically an ESP32-C3 e-ink dev board that comes with a nice case and battery. The X4 Pro notably comes with an ESP32-S3 which means a lot more RAM, but this project targets both that and the X3/X4 that use the C3 version. Using the C3 means working within some rather stringent limits, as Xteink didn’t spring for any PSRAM, so [t0mg] had less memory to work with than folks did in the 80s.

This project is specifically focused on adventures using the scripting language ink, and comes with its own IDE called eenky to roll your own choose your own adventure book. It’s all on GitHub under an MIT license, and if you want to see it in action there’s a demo video embedded below.

Speaking of Zork, it wasn’t just the first commercial text adventure; it brought some important technological innovations, too.

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Miniaturizing The Atari 2600 Console

August 20, 2026 by 15 Comments

For as popular as Atari was in their heyday, it wasn’t until well after they were on their famous decline that they released their first handheld, the Atari Lynx. In retrospect, competing with the Game Boy was not going to be a recipe for success even without considering their other problems as a company, and as a result was their penultimate console before exiting the market completely. But [Nick]’s most recent project asks what the world would have been like with an Atari handheld from their golden era, and has been working on this miniaturized version of the 2600.

Unlike any modern emulators which can easily handle Atari 2600 games in almost any form factor today, this console is doing it all with as much original hardware as possible. It uses much smaller switches and buttons compared to the original, and omits some other unnecessary hardware for today’s world like the RF modulator. [Nick] has also designed a custom PCB that reduces the overall footprint considerably as well, and has relocated the cartridge port in preparation for its eventual handheld shape. The result is a console using original hardware that’s less than half the footprint of the original.

Although there were around 30 million Atari 2600 consoles sold and the system is unlikely to be a real collector’s item anytime soon, [Nick] makes sure to note that no real 2600 hardware was harmed in this build. And, as far as its handheld nature, this is a stepping stone on the path to that eventual goal. We’ll look forward to an eventual system that integrates a screen and controller as well as a port for the original cartridges. In the meantime, here’s another handheld 2600 that fits completely inside one of those cartridges.

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Open Book Touch Makes Crowd Funding Debut

July 14, 2026 by 22 Comments

If you have even the slightest interest in open hardware e-readers, you’ve certainly heard of [Joey Castillo]’s Open Book project. We’ve covered his efforts to develop an affordable reader that delivers a Kindle-like experience without the Orwellian megacorp trappings for several years now, and watched with great interest as the core hardware has evolved.

So we were particularly excited over the weekend to see the Open Book Touch finally hit Crowd Supply, and judging by the fact that the campaign for the $149 device has already blown past 60% of its funding goal in just a few days, it seems like we weren’t the only ones.

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Review: The Tanmatsu, A Year On

July 1, 2026 by 10 Comments

About 18 months ago, we brought you a sneak peek at a handheld that started life in the Dutch conference badge scene. At the time it showed promise, but its software wasn’t ready for a fair review. Now it has both a stable operating system and a growing software library. It’s time to put it through its paces and see what it can do.

A Handheld Computer For Hackers

The Tanmatsu PCB, showing all the different parts.
The bare PCB, with the expansion connector bottom centre.

The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”), is a general putpose palmtop computer based around an ESP32-P4 application processor from Espressif. It takes the form of a PCB and PETG 3D printed sandwich, with the front face PCB sporting a silicone QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 MIPI DSI display. The keyboard should be familiar to many readers, being the same moulding as the Solder Party KeebDeck which has appeared on other devices.

Under the hood that P4 has two 400MHz RISC-V cores and 32MB of PSRAM with 16MB of Flash, and there’s an ESP32-C6 for WiFi, BLE and IEEE 802.15.4 mesh networking. There’s an Ebyte LoRa module with an SMA antenna too, which can be had in 868, or 915MHz versions depending on where in the world you live. Continue reading “Review: The Tanmatsu, A Year On” →

Reflective LCD Slabtop Terminal Runs Homebrewed Solar OS

June 26, 2026 by 18 Comments

Have you ever spotted something in a catalog or on a website and just known you had to build a project around that one part? That’s how [nilseuropa] felt about the Waveshare ESP32-S3-RLCD-4.2, which — as you might guess from the name — pairs an ESP32-S3 with a reflective LCD. With a screen reminiscent of a palmtop of yore, [nilseuropa] wanted a personal device, and needed something to run on it. That’s where Solar OS comes in.

Physically he’s paired the Waveshare board with a mini keyboard and put them together in a handsome 3D printed case with a battery. The slabtop form-factor was more for ease-of-creation than any preference; in the project’s reddit thread [nils] is reaching out for help making something cooler, possibly of the palmtop form-factor. He also describes some of the thinking behind his operating system.

You had us at “terminal”.

He’s not starting entirely from scratch: it’s based on FreeRTOS and the ESP-IDE toolset. Right now all applications are built with the OS into a single binary, while the SD card on the Waveshare board handles persistent storage. The interface is pure text, with all applications launched via shell commands. That doesn’t mean you have to go back to your PC to add anything, however.

The system is user-programmable, with Python and Lua scripting as “first class citizens”, having access to the hardware through the Solar OS APIs. As for the applications built into the firmware, it looks like along with the serial terminal, you get quite a lot: an orthodox file manager à la Norton Commander, networking tools that include a web browser and chat client, MP3 player, image viewer, text editor, games, and more.

While they are obviously pretty niche projects, we do appreciate that there’s a growing collection of homebrew operating systems that you can run on your bespoke computing device.

STM32 Handheld Has OpenGL And All The Classics

June 2, 2026 by 21 Comments

We do sometimes go on about how absurdly powerful microcontrollers are these days, but this time it’s technically a microprocessor, not a microcontroller, at the heart of the build — specifically, an STM32MP2. Still, you know you’re living in the future when an STM32 of any sort can not only run [John Cronin]’s gk handheld game console, but provide 3D acceleration to boot.

Full disclosure: you’ve seen this handheld here before — sorta. That was version 3, which was an STM32-based handheld.  V3 used the much less powerful STM32H7S7L8, with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU. The STM32MP2, by contrast, has dual Cortex-A35 cores running 1.5 GHz and a bonus Cortex-M33. It’s running a custom OS called gkos, which is mostly POSIX-compliant and boasts nigh-instantaneous boot times.

As with the last version, you can run a bevy of emulators from the 8-bit to the 32-bit era, but the added power and OpenGL support mean this handheld also runs N64 games via a fork of mupen64. There are also emulators for ‘real’ computers, namely Atari ST and XL, and a little-known thing known as a “PC”. DOSBox gets the equivalent performance of a 50 MHz 486, which means you can run all the classics, including DOOM, though that will be more performant running the native-running port of sdl-DOOM.

You also get extra inputs to play with and a bigger screen compared to the last version. Oh, and WiFi. There are accelerometers for tilt control, and did we mention the screen’s touch input is supported? If it weren’t for the form-factor, we’d call this a capable little computer. The GK handheld looks like an awesome handheld console, check it out in the demo video below.

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It’s Another Pi Handheld. But It’s A Really Good One

May 30, 2026 by 29 Comments

Ever since the first Linux capable single-board computers came out, there have been projects turning them into handhelds. The Raspberry Pi Zero and in particular the Compute Modules are ideally suited to this. While there are more common projects that find their way into our feed we’ve certainly seen a few of them in our time, enough now that a new one has to be special to really catch our eye. Which brings us to the PiBrick from [Ahmad Amarullah], which sets the bar pretty high.

The device is a Compute Module 5 smartphone sized computer with a 3.92″ OLED touch display and the ubiquitous BlackBerry-derived keyboard. It’s drawn together with a PCB that holds all components and peripherals, and this and the 5000 mAH battery fit in a 3D printed shell that gives it the form factor of a chunky smartphone. You can see it at the link above, and also find it in a GitHub repository.

Handheld computers always represent something of a compromise as they can only ever offer relatively small screens and keyboards. But they live or die on their versatility and robustness, both of which this one has in spades. We like it, a lot.

Thanks [Nick] for the tip.