Embedded and hobbyist hardware specialist LILYGO has launched a new version of its T-Watch wearable development platform dubbed the T-Watch Ultra — featuring an AMOLED display, integrated LoRa transceiver, and an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller.
LILYGO is no stranger to watch-style wearables: the company released its original TTGO T-Watch back in 2019, before updating it a year later with a slimline redesign dubbed the T-Watch-2020. A year after that, the T-Watch 2020 V3 was released, adding a microphone to the design — but the new T-Watch Ultra is a considerable upgrade over everything that has come before.
LILYGO has a new smartwatch, the T-Watch Ultra — now featuring an AMOLED display and LoRa connectivity. (📷: LILYGO)
The new smartwatch development platform, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, is based on the more powerful Espressif ESP32-S3, giving it a pair of Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores running at up to 240MHz plus 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) and 16MB of quad-SPI program flash, with a mciroSD Card slot for storage expansion. This is hidden behind the watch’s display, a 2.06″ AMOLED touchscreen with a 410×502 resolution — both bigger and brighter than the 1.54″ LCD touchscreen of the T-Watch-2020 V3.
There’s been a big upgrade on the connectivity front, too. The Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy and single-band 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi radios of the earlier watches are still intact, but LILYGO has chosen to add a Semtech SX1262 LoRa transceiver — meaning, should the firmware be ported to the platform, the potential for the watch to be used as a node on the Meshtastic community-driven mesh and other LoRa-based networks. There’s also a u-blox MIA-M10Q Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver and a six-axis Bosch BHI260AP inertial measurement unit with integrated machine learning core.
The watch is surprisingly compact, given the amount of hardware LILYGO has crammed into its housing. (📷: LILYGO)
Other features include a microphone, amplified speaker, haptic vibration motor, Near Field Communication (NFC) transceiver, and — as you’d hope to find in a device that is, when all is said and done, a watch — a real-time clock. An internal 1,100mAh battery keeps the device ticking, with a USB Type-C connector for charging and data; programming is supported via the Arduino IDE, MicroPython, and Espressif’s own ESP-IDF.
The T-Watch Ultra is listed on the LILYGO website now at $78.32, though at the time of writing was showing as out-of-stock; more information is available on the product’s GitHub page.