Berglet / hardware
Hardware.
Smaller than a playing card, with a bright screen and real buttons that click. Here's what's inside.
a Spec sheet
- Size
- 55.6 × 80.7 × 26.4 mm, with a keyring eyelet on one corner
- Processor
- ESP32-S3, two cores at 240 MHz
- Memory
- 8 MB flash, 8 MB PSRAM
- Screen
- 1.69-inch colour LCD, 280 × 240, rounded corners, dimmable backlight
- Controls
- Twelve buttons: D-pad, A B X Y, L and R shoulders, Start and Select. Real click switches.
- Sound
- Digital amplifier and a 40 mm speaker on the back
- Storage
- microSD card for games, saves, screenshots and players
- Wireless
- Wi-Fi for the editor, updates and games that use the internet. A direct console-to-console link for playing and sharing nearby. Bluetooth LE available to games written in C.
- Port
- USB-C: charging, a drive for dropping games on, and a developer shell
- Power
- Rechargeable lithium battery. Sleeps with the screen, card and speaker switched off; Start wakes it.
- Software
- Game library, quick menu with save states, signed updates, Berglet Studio in the browser, Lua and Python, C and WebAssembly
b For tinkerers
Fifteen pins, all spoken for
The processor module offers fifteen usable pins. Here's who got them.
Three of them do double duty as button-matrix columns and as control lines for the display and the card, which only works with some care and one diode. The story is on the deep page.
| Pins | Job |
|---|---|
| 3 | Sound to the amplifier (I2S) |
| 3 | One shared SPI bus: clock, data out, data in, for both display and card |
| 3 | Button columns, which are also: card select, display select, display data/command and the battery reading |
| 4 | Button rows |
| 1 | Backlight brightness |
| 1 | The switch for the power rail that feeds display, card and amplifier |
c The case
Two shells, no screws
A front shell with the screen window and button openings, a back shell with the speaker grille and battery bay. They snap together at seven points. A one-piece D-pad, four round face buttons with engraved letters that can't spin, two small ovals, two shoulders.
The 3D console on the front page is the case's real model, not an artist's impression.
- Buttons
- Stand 2.2 mm proud of the face
- Window
- Shows only the lit part of the screen
- Corner
- An eyelet for a keyring or a strap