LILYGO T-Echo Card is a thin development kit based on Nordic Semi nRF52840 wireless MCU and a Semtech SX1262 LoRa transceiver with a solar panel for charging an 800 mAh battery. It supports Bluetooth 5, NFC, Bluetooth Mesh, ANT, 802.15.4 (Zigbee/Thread), LoRaWAN, and GNSS (L76K module) connectivity.
The board also features a 0.42-inch OLED information display, a magnetic USB interface, a 9-axis motion sensor, a digital microphone, a speaker, and an RGB LED for status/notifications. It’s mainly useful for off-grid communication (text and audio), GNSS location sharing, personal/asset tracking, and as a compact mesh network node.
T-Echo Card specifications:
- SoC – Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840
- CPU – 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller @ 64 MHz
- Memory/Storage – 1 MB Flash, 256 KB RAM
- Wireless – Bluetooth 5, NFC, Bluetooth Mesh, 802.15.4 (Zigbee/Thread), ANT, 2.4 GHz proprietary
- Storage – 32 Mbit SPI flash (ZD25WQ32CEIGR)
- LoRa transceiver – Semtech SX1262 with global coverage support: 400~520MHz and 830~945MHz frequency bands
- GNSS
- L76K module with support for GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS, multi-system joint positioning + AGNSS
- Built-in GPS antenna
- Display – 0.42-inch I2C OLED with 72 x 40 resolution; SSD1315 driver
- Audio
- 8Ω 1W speaker; I2S Class-D mono amp (MAX98357)
- Digital MEMS PDM microphone (MP34DT05)
- Buzzer
- USB – Magnetic USB interface for power and programming
- Sensor – Low power 9-axis (3-axis Gyroscope + 3-axis Accelerometer + 3-axis Compass + DMP) motion sensor (ICM20948)
- Misc
- Reset, Boot, and User buttons (Orange color)
- RGB LED for status and notifications
- Power Supply
- 5V via USB magnetic interface
- 5V, 0.25W solar panel
- 800 mAh battery
- Dimensions – 90 x 60 x 9.5 mm
- IP Rating – IP66 (weatherproof)
LILYGO provides Arduino firmware and code samples for the OLED display, LoRa communication, walkie-talkie communication using Codec2, the buzzer, the GPS module, the 9-axis IMU sensor, the RGB LED, and more. However, NFC is currently not supported in the default firmware since it’s not supported in the nRF52 Arduino core. The wiki has a few more details.
Besides the default firmware, the T-Echo Card is supported by the popular Meshtastic and MeshCore off-grid communication firmware. You won’t find the T-Echo Card in the Meshtastic web flasher for now, but support was already merged last May, and you could build the firmware yourself. However, community firmware is already available on the MeshCore flasher.
It’s not quite the first time we’ve come across thin, weatherproof LoRa devices, and two other popular options include the RAKwireless WisMesh Tag and Seeed Studio’s T1000-E credit card-sized Meshtastic GPS tracker. They are slimmer than the T-Echo Card, but the LILYGO device includes additional features such as a solar panel, voice support through a speaker and microphone, and a small OLED information display.
It’s also a little more expensive. While the RAKwireless and Seeed Studio devices both go for $40, the T-Echo Card sells for $74.98 on AliExpress with its USB magnetic cable, or $60.31 on the LILYGO store, but it’s currently out of stock there. It might eventually become available on the company’s Amazon store with the other T-Echo models.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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