The first company to bring a smartphone with a flexible display to market has now released a development kit for folks that want to design their own hardware, test their own software, or otherwise test a flexible display.

Priced at $959, the new Royole RoKit development kit isn’t exactly cheap. But it’s more affordable than buying foldable phone from Samsung, Royole, or others – those tend to be priced at $1500 and up.

Royole’s development kit includes a 7.8 inch, 1920 x 1440 pixel flexible AMOLED display with a capacitive touch panel plus a mainboard with the guts of a mid-range Android device including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, a gyroscope, USB-C connector for data, and a speaker for audio. It supports Android 10 software.

There’s also an HDMI transfer board that allows you to connect the flexible display to other computers (there are Windows 10 drivers for the touchscreen).

The display panel measures189mm x 129mm (7.4″ x 5.1″) and the mainboard is 129mm x 22mm (5.1″ x 0.9″). Royole packs everything into an aluminum briefcase for protection and easy transport. But it also makes the kit look a little bit like an awkwardly designed laptop.

Royole also includes a number of cables, sensors, and other gear with the kit, including an optical distance sensing expansion board, a power conversion board, and a microphone extension board.

The RoKit Flexible Electronics Development Kit is available from Royole or Seeed Studio for $959.

press release

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One reply on “Royole’s RoKit is flexible display dev kit for $959”

  1. This is neat, but it doesn’t seem that they’re offering you any support/data on how exactly you could take the next step and implement this hardware into your own product design. I’ve read their PDFs, and it seems that they’re just offering this hardware, and nothing else. My guess is that they would probably discuss design costs with you if you wanted to make a large order of panels.

    At the end of the day, this is just a screen and an HDMI to MIPI-DSI converter board. So this will just let you get a screen working using their provided hardware.

    As an amateur PCB/motherboard designer, I’ve been trying to research the MIPI-DSI interface for various projects, but it seems you need to be a dues-paying member of the MIPI consortium (you need to be a big company) to access the necessary datasheets.

    This would be very useful to me if Royole provided a PCB reference design for the MIPI-DSI Transmit Bridge. The only similar designs I’ve been able to find seem to be specific to a certain product.

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