PiPhone – A Raspberry-Pi-based Smartphone

http://www.raspberrypi.org/piphone-home-made-raspberry-pi-smartphone/

by benn_88 • 12 years ago

185 53 12 years ago

octagonal2• 12 years ago

He should really consider smoothing it out a bit and selling it as a beginners' kit somewhere.

I would love to give my little nephew something like this where he would have to assemble all the separate parts and do some basic Linux configuration. Perhaps Adafruit could help him out with that?

damian20002• 12 years ago

It mentions no soldering is required, but there's bound to be some tricky bits involved.

dec0dedab0de2• 12 years ago

Perhaps Adafruit could help him out with that?

That is very likely. Adafruit just previewed a cellphone platform called Fona, but its still in development.

ptorrone• 12 years ago

correct, stay tuned!

esrauch• 12 years ago

Any source on that? Searching for Adafruit Fona only gives this thread and some junk results.

olegkikin• 12 years ago

PiBrick.

HPLovecraft• 12 years ago

PiDick

nnnnni• 12 years ago

So... what's the battery life like?

damian20002• 12 years ago

He mentions he thinks a couple of hours on his blog post comments section.

aw3c2• 12 years ago

Direct link: http://www.davidhunt.ie/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-smartph...

dang• 12 years ago

Thanks! We changed it.

HN strongly prefers original sources. The original url [1] was just a summary of this one, with a video.

Edit: The traffic seems to have killed the server within seconds of the URL change, so I'll change it back for now. If davidhunt.ie comes back, would someone please let us know?

Edit 2: Trying again. Edit 3: Down again. Probably best to give up.

1. http://www.raspberrypi.org/piphone-home-made-raspberry-pi-sm...

sspiff• 12 years ago

This is the first I hear of these Sim900 boards. Are there any other boards like it? Possibly 3G compatible models or slimmer versions with just soldering leads instead of jacks? I guess you could easily remove the jacks anyway if you needed to.

Combined with some of the slimmer boards out there (like one of the many old Allwinner sticks or Gumstix), this could actually be used to build a real open source DIY phone platform.

coffeecheque• 12 years ago

I've used the SIM900 boards a few times for a few moments with Arduino project. They are good and simple, but as you say not 3G (only GSM).

I assume the 3G modules are different or not as in demand by Chinese manufacturers, which is why I haven't seen any on eBay when I go looking.

I'd love a simple, cheap 3G module. It'd make the coverage better for a start.

pjc50• 12 years ago

Sierra Wireless have 3G modules, although they're not particularly simple or cheap.

mschuster91• 12 years ago

Some Huawei data sticks carry phone-capability according to their "Mobile Partner" software (there's support for it in the disabled modules. Mobile Partner is a pile of shit but sometimes it's actually useful).

I do not know however which exact sticks can do this.

userbinator5• 12 years ago

3G module with bonus GPS: http://www.ebay.com/itm/261346638302

Appears to be a Qualcomm QSC6270-based module.

seba_dos15• 12 years ago

There are lots of them. Just look at what GTA04 and Neo900 are using (Option and Cinterion). Such project can't accept closed baseband being highly integrated with main CPU and RAM like most of modern smartphones do, so they use ready 3G/LTE modules to move it out as a USB peripheral in CPU perspective.

tempodox• 12 years ago

Wonderful. I want a πPhone!

userbinator5• 12 years ago

Given that Broadcom originally designed the BCM2835 for smartphones, this could be said to be an actual "intended application" of the SoC. :)

$15 for a 2.5Ah battery is rather overpriced, however - as are the rest of the components like the screen and DC-DC. I found the SIM900 on eBay for $15, the DC-DC for $1.50, and ~ $5 for a battery of similar capacity. He could've put the whole thing together for <$100. Having done some electronics sourcing in China really changes your perspective on cost... amusingly enough, there was actually an iPhone 3G clone a few years ago called the PiPhone.

It's an interesting project but practically speaking $100 (no contract) can already buy a pretty good smartphone these days... and one with a more "unofficially open" SoC too.

The antenna sticking out of it is the best part.

dec0dedab0de2• 12 years ago

Having done some electronics sourcing in China really changes your perspective on cost

Do you have any tips on doing this? Other than alibaba?

jayfehr• 12 years ago

I've used http://www.dx.com quite a bit. Prices are really, really low. Shipping is free. However, you may have to wait two months for your products to arrive.

Since most of this stuff is based off of open source hardware it's pretty much identical to the name brand stuff. So it pretty much comes down to a cost/time ratio consideration when first starting out. Before you know it though, you will have quite a large collection of parts built up.

Also remember you can hit garage sales, recycle yards, and thrift shops to find a lot of old hardware that you can salvage valuable parts out of for less than the price of the parts themselves.

Edit: made link clickable

pepijndevos• 12 years ago

As someone who has built an MP3 player with the RPi, I can tell you that the RPi is NOT made to run of a battery.

http://pepijndevos.nl/2013/11/21/raspberry-pi-mp3-player.htm...

The 2200Mah battery will only last a couple of hours.

xnbya• 12 years ago

The network / usb chip takes quite a bit of power relatively, so the model A could last a bit longer on the 2200ah battery

uuid_to_string4• 12 years ago

   "It's an interesting project but practically speaking $100 (no contract) can already buy a pretty good smartphone these days... and one with a more "unofficially open" SoC too."

Does that smartphone with a "more unofficially open" SoC boot from SD card?

Is it OS agnostic?

I would actually be willing to pay more than the going rate for a "smartphone" that that allowed me to use my own bootloader and my own choice of OS, and one with no ties to search engine ad sales companies or the like.

I just want a handheld computer with a decent enclosure and which can be controlled with time-tested, open source drivers.

It does not need to have impressive specs, just a small form factor and easy to control with any open source OS.

If it can make phone calls, all the better.

seba_dos15• 12 years ago

http://neo900.org/

mike-cardwell• 12 years ago

Those touch screen TFTs look awesome, and incredibly cheap considering how much more you can do with a PI with one of them attached.

wingerlang• 12 years ago

There is no way that phone is smaller than the ones he has had before. Unless you count the mammoths from the 90s and down.

Cool projects though.

kevinchen• 12 years ago

Yeah, the point is to do it as a learning exercise. Nobody is going to carry this around in their pocket.

userbinator5• 12 years ago

It'd also be a very very bad idea to try going aboard a plane with it.

reustle• 12 years ago

How hard would it be to get Android installed and talking to the hardware properly?

zhemao2• 12 years ago

The status of Android support on the Raspberry Pi doesn't seem very promising so far.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=73&t=71658...

http://androidpi.wikia.com/wiki/Android_Pi_Wiki

leoc• 12 years ago

PhoneBlox-style fancy modular smartphones are an interesting prospect, but I really wish there was a simple replaceable-parts phone design based on ordinary development-board-style PCBs. Make it about 25mm thick and then it would be somewhat viable to carry around as a nerdy but genuinely usable phone, while still having enough internal space to be based on replaceable PCBs without too much pressure to miniaturise. Such a standard would have lots of utility: as a testbed for commercial phone development, as a place to experiment with new hardware or software for phones, as a phone (or just a gadget) incorporating niche (or "niche-of-one") hardware or software you can't get in a commercial device, as the equivalent of a self-build PC for enthusiasts.

dman• 12 years ago

Heres to me hoping that I can have a tablet which I can use to documents and use rsync to keep the documents synchronized with my workstation. Have been waiting for the kde vivaldi tablet. Also unclear if the latest bay trail tablets will run linux without issue.

thaumaturgy• 12 years ago

I'd love to put my own little cell phone together, but in my area the only reliable provider is Verizon, and I haven't been able to find a CDMA module for Pi or Arduino or otherwise.

Anybody got a tip on this?

octagonal2• 12 years ago

You might want to try posting this question on specialist electronics subreddits and forums like r/electronics, r/rfelectronics, r/electronic_circuits/, r/hwstartups and r/hardware. So I guess my advice would be to treat it like a numbers' game :). There's bound to be someone out there who can help you.

zz1• 12 years ago

Off topic, but I think it is a good opportunity to spread the world about it: PiPhone is also an open source tool build by La Quadrature du Net in order to allow citizens to call their representatives (in France and the European Parliament).

https://github.com/LaQuadratureDuNet/piphone

http://piphone.lqdn.fr/

mmphosis2• 12 years ago

I know that there are relatively cheap USB line inputs available, but I didn't see what the PiPhone was using.

What components are used for the PiPhone's microphone?

zhemao2• 12 years ago

Oh yeah, that's a good question. I've helped people with RPi audio projects before and getting external microphones to work consistently has been one of the biggest pains.

mmphosis2• 12 years ago

Now there is a video. In the video, he plugs a head set and a microphone into the SIM900. The audio out, 2 usb ports, and ethernet port are unused on the Pi.

suyash• 12 years ago

You can also run Java Embedded and ME also on Raspberry PI!

PiPhone – A Raspberry-Pi-based Smartphone

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