LILYGO's Smartphone-Like T-Display K230 Packs a Kendryte Chip and LoRa Transceiver for AIoT Projects

Embedded and hobbyist electronics specialist LILYGO has launched a new all-in-one development board targeting the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) market: the T-Display K230, which includes a Kendryte K230D system-on-chip and both Wi-Fi and LoRa connectivity.

LILYGO's all-in-one two-board T-Display K230 is built around Kendryte's K230D system-on-chip, giving it two 64-bit T-Head XuanTie C908 RISC-V processors, one running at 1.6GHz and featuring the RISC-V Vector Extensions (RVV) 1.0 and the other running at 800MHz and lacking the vector extensions, plus a proprietary Kendryte Processing Unit (KPU) neural coprocessor designed to accelerate on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads. There's LPDDR4 memory on board, too, though LILYGO's specs listing is unclear as to whether this is 8GB or 1GB (8Gb).

The device, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, also includes a vision processing pipeline that consist of a "3D structured light depth engine" and hardware codecs for H.264 and H.265 video. To make use of this, LILYGO has added a two megapixel Galaxycore GC2093 CMOS image sensor capable of capturing at 1080p30. If that's not enough, there are connectors for an additional two cameras.

For network connectivity, there's a Realtek RTL8289 single-band 2.4GHz Wi-Fi module — plus, somewhat unusually given the form factor, a wired Ethernet port. There's also a Semtech SX1262 LoRa transceiver on the board, providing long-range low-power wireless connectivity. There's a built-in microphone and an analog audio jack — though no on-board speaker. As you'd expect from a T-Display board there's also a display, a full-color 1232×568 AMOLED touchscreen to provide a smartphone-like form factor.

The T-Display K230 is now available on the LILYGO store for $98.79, while the display and development board can also be purchased separately for $59.96 and $42.74 respectively.