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Chinese electronics maker LilyGo is selling a keyboard kit that effectively turns one of the company’s cheap smartwatches into a device that looks more like a tiny replica of a desktop computer.

The LilyGo T-Watch-Keyboard-C3 is available from AliExpress with prices starting at $19 for a keyboard and speaker that connect to an existing watch or $55 for a full kit that also includes the watch parts (stuffed in a case that looks like a tiny PC monitor).

As you’d probably expect for a gadget in that price range, this isn’t really going to be very useful for desktop computing. But it’s a pretty interesting way to remix the guts of an inexpensive, low-power smartwatch and it goes to show that the line between PCs and other gadgets (like wearables) is rather blurry.

The T-Watch itself features a 1.54 inch LCD display, a 240 MHz ESP32-D0WDQ6 dual-core microcontroller, and just 8MB of memory and 16MB of flash storage. But it supports WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4, has a USB Type-C port for power and data, and a 3-axis accelerometer (which is designed for step counting, but may also work for other motion or gesture recognition).

The Watch-Keyboard-C3 kit includes a mini keyboard, and a 160 MHz ESP32-C3 single-core RISC-V microcontroller and support for WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0. An optional audio module with a mic and speaker are also available, but it looks like that’s not included if you buy the $55 T-Watch-Keyboard-C3 kit, and you’d need to buy a second keyboard + audio kit to get it.

While the system is programmable using Arduino tools and some sample source code is available, CNX Software notes that LilyGo hasn’t provided much documentation for its new keyboard/watch/mini PC kit. So buyer beware… or be prepared to figure things out on your own.

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8 replies on “This tiny keyboard kit turns a cheap smartwatch into a cheap mini-desktop computer”

  1. I’m impressed! This brings the Liliputing theme to its apex. It’s not for me, but it’s a breakthrough for tiny computing.

    1. The TTGO T-watch 2020 v1/v2/v3 are actually pretty amazing. I have one and it has been great. Wrote a bunch of code for it.

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