Build Your Own Tiny Open Source Cell Phone -- Add Cellular Capability to Anything

[helmuth_hubener]

Build Your Own Tiny Open Source Cell Phone -- Add Cellular Capability to Anything

Making a cellphone is easy. You go into a mine, pull up some ore, extract various metals and then add components that you manufacture from other mines. Then you have to get FCC clearance and create lithium ion battery. Finally, you need to write a Snake game. If you can’t do that, try RePhone.

The project is actually a tiny circuit board with a SIM slot and an optional screen. It also supports Bluetooth. You’re going to want to get the $49 Kit Create, a tiny watch-like system that includes a little case and all the modules. It’s like getting a tiny unlocked cellphone for under $50.

This is obviously an experimental board but I checked it out a week ago and it seemed to work fairly well. It includes programming libraries in Arduino IDE, Lua and Javascript that allow you to connect the phone to the web and even IFTTT.

It’s a fun little project and it works pretty well. While you won’t gain the experience of mining your own gold for wire traces and learning chip fabrication, this will let you make a phone quickly and easily which is great for all of us hobbyists without ready access to mineral rights.

-- http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/23/rep...-into-a-phone/

[fisharmor]

Can I get a ****ing QWERTY keyboard for it??????????

[fisharmor]

LOLOL the "worlds first open source modular phone"

That's a not-subtle stab at Google. We were supposed to have Ara generally released in January 2015.

Seriously though, Arduino? It's true that most of the processing power in any computer these days is just plain wasted, but Arduino's probably aren't capable of running Android. Arduinos aren't really processors per se, they're microcontrollers.

I like this form factor better than Ara, though, since I have everything I need to make custom cast Aluminum bodies. (Well, everything except the specialty coatings.)

[helmuth_hubener]

Sure, of course! You could get this:

http://lucidtronix.com/products/16



The RePhone is reportedly compatible with Arduino, so you should be able to get it working.

Seeed Studios (the maker of RePhone) also appears to have a library for hooking up a key pad to their earlier project, the LinkIt ONE, though I'm not sure what key pad(s) specifically it was written for. But it could come in handy.

https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/Link...ude/vmkeypad.h

[fisharmor]

That's cool. The only thing left is software... slider phones have something in the OS that detects whether the keyboard is slid out, and it disables the on-screen keyboard. That's important because the whole point of the keyboard is not to lose that screen real estate.

[helmuth_hubener]

LOLOL the "worlds first open source modular phone"

That's a not-subtle stab at Google. We were supposed to have Ara generally released in January 2015.

Yes, true.

Seriously though, Arduino? It's true that most of the processing power in any computer these days is just plain wasted, but Arduino's probably aren't capable of running Android. Arduinos aren't really processors per se, they're microcontrollers.

They aren't processors or microcontrollers! Arduino is the software platform, not a specific chip or even chip family. You can get the Intel Edison (Intel Atom 500MHz dual-core, dual-threaded CPU) that runs Arduino sketches, for example. You can get any of a huge variety of hardware that can run Arduino sketches.

For "more power" than a typical Arduino board, you could try the Teensy 3.2 which just came out. It has a 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4 72 MHz CPU.



You could get a Teensy, https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy32.html , and a cellular shield (plug-in module), https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9607 , and voila before you know it be building things like this:



So you could make your own phone going that direction, too. That's a little more starting from scratch, though. Which could be good, depending on your goal.

Anyway, the RePhone also uses an ARM chip:

- Microcontroller: MT2502A
- MCU Core: 32-bit ARM7EJ-STM RISC processor
- RAM: 4MB
- Flash Memory: 16MB
- Power Supply: 3.3 – 4.2V
- Quad-band: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
- GPRS: Class 12 modem
- Clock Speed: 260 MHz
- Connector: 35 PIN Connector & 11 PIN Connector for Xadow
- Interfaces: External ports for LCD, camera, I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO etc.

If you want to know more about the MT2502A, you may refer to the official documentation in the following link:
http://labs.mediatek.com/fileMedia/d...3-c1ae990d83e3

Then you need service. There exists cellular service specifically geared towards "makers" with their own custom devices.

[CPUd]

Arduino also makes boards, they use Atmel 16 or 32-bit microcontrollers.

[helmuth_hubener]

Arduino also makes boards, they use Atmel 16 or 32-bit microcontrollers.

Yes, but this project has nothing to do with those boards, despite having the word Arduino associated with it. That's what was throwing fisharmor off and what I was addressing. Indeed there is no way one could run Android very well on the Arduino-made Arduino boards. Except maybe the Leonardo.... Yep, sure enough, a quick search shows it's been done:

http://www.arduinodroid.info/2013/11...o-support.html

But the ARM chip Seeed is using is a different story. Anyway....

[CPUd]

Yes, but this project has nothing to do with those boards, despite having the word Arduino associated with it. That's what was throwing fisharmor off and what I was addressing. Indeed there is no way one could run Android very well on the Arduino-made Arduino boards. Except maybe the Leonardo.... Yep, sure enough, a quick search shows it's been done:

http://www.arduinodroid.info/2013/11...o-support.html

But the ARM chip Seeed is using is a different story. Anyway....

I do like Ardiuno software platform and mini-IDE. On an Ubuntu system, it worked pretty much out of the box.