README.md

Tulip for the T-Deck

The T-Deck is a ESP32-S3 device with (small) touchscreen, small blackberry-style keyboard, LoRA (optional), speaker, microphone, SD card slot, battery charging IC, trackball. The price flucuates but I got the one with LoRA for $60 shipped. It's running a ESP32-S3 N16R8 (16MB flash, 8MB RAM), which meets Tulip CC specs.

I've ported Tulip CC to it and most things work just fine. The screen is 320x240, so you'll only get 53x30 text in the console / editor. The screen is powered by an ST7789 SPI display controller. We're able to use our existing Tulip CC display code as a framebuffer and we blit over DMA each 12-row line of a screen every frame, to reach a very stable 30FPS when everything on the screen changes at once. The synth works fine but is mono only and the speaker can use an upgrade (luckily, it is removable!) You can get batteries with the smaller JST pins already on that fit right in. That and a back case or rubber band and you've got a portable Python "deck" for music, graphics, and games.

To flash your T-Deck with Tulip, follow the Tulip CC flashing instructions. You can flash a precompiled version of Tulip without having to compile anything.

We default the T-Deck to a 6x8 REPL font, to get 53x30 REPL / editor screen instead of 40x20.

PLEASE NOTE -- Tulip works on a T-Deck, but it's not "supported" in the sense that we'll always test new features on it. Our main focus is on the 7" Tulip CC from Makerfabs.. For example, many of the newer music making tools on Tulip (voices, Juno-6 editor) won't work well on the T-Deck and we're not likely to port it to the smaller screen. But it's still quite usable!

Keyboard Characters:

• Control (for control-C, control-X (save in editor), etc) is set by pressing left-shift and the microphone/0 key at the same time. Release that combo and then hit the key you want. (like C, or X)
• A raw REPL can be enabled by pressing sym and then shift+b, to revert back to the normal REPL simply press sym and then shift+l.
• An alternate character set can be accessed by pressing alt+c: The following characters are made available:

Default	Alternate	Notes
q	~
w	%
e	|
r	%
t	{
y	}
(	[	Requires sym button to be pressed after alt+c
)	]	Requires sym button to be pressed after alt+c
u	^
i	<
o	>
p	=
g	\
k	`
<space>	<tab>

Notes:

• The trackball is mapped to the arrow keys.
• USB for MIDI and real keyboard should work, but it's annoying to test as the UART for monitoring goes over the same USB connection. It also doesn't seem that the power pins for the USB connection are present. There's a header on back for serial monitoring, so MIDI could work over that, perhaps a USB power injector would work with a USB keyboard.
• If you get your T-Deck in a state where your computer can't find its USB-Serial connection anymore (probably because you're doing something with USB on Tulip), you have to force it back into bootloader mode before it'll flash again. To do that, flip it off, then hold down the trackball button (GPIO0) while flipping it back on again. You can let go of the ball right after you flip it on. The next time you flash, it'll stay in bootloader mode until you hit the "reset" button (opposite side from the power switch.) If you're trying to connect to the monitor, you'll see "waiting for download" -- that's your hint to hit the reset button.
• Someone could update the display code to variably refresh based on which parts of the screen was changing, as the S7789 has its own screen refresh RAM. But it may not be worth it. By default we refresh the entire screen every frame and achieve 30FPS using a 80MHz clock.

Still todo

• Touchscreen support
• Serial console - you can read but not write to it
• USB host support for keyboard and MIDI
• SD card support
• LoRA
• Battery voltage reporting
• Integrate CTRL into the current keyboard implementation
• Microphone support
• Try 120MHz SPI