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Man Builds DIY Cellphone Using Raspberry Pi
Photographer and software engineer Dave Hunt has posted an article about his most recent project: a DIY cellphone based on a Raspberry Pi (he calls it a PiPhone). It has a touchscreen dialing interface for making calls, and it's built with off-the-shelf components. The total bill of materials clocks in at about $158: $40 for the rPi, $35 for the 320x240 touchscreen, $15 for the LiPo battery, $48 for the GSM module, and about $20 for miscellaneous other minor parts. Hunt says, '[The GSM/GPRS module] allow us to send standard AT commands to it to make calls, hang up, send texts, data etc. Overall a very clever module. Towards the bottom of the white PCB, you can see the SIM Card, which allows the module to associate with my local GSM network, and it’s using a regular prepaid SIM card, bought in my local phone store for €10. Below the GSM module, you can see the on.off switch and a DC-DC converter, which converts the 3.7volts from the LiPoly battery to 5volts needed by everything else.' He points out that the phone is not terribly practical, but it's a neat project. Hunt has done several others, including turning the Raspberry Pi into a controller for time-lapse photography. He'll be publishing the code he wrote for the PiPhone next week.
Start mass producing these puppies.
big, bulky and hard to fit in pocket but still better then phones filled with bloatware
It guides the user through a series of steps to download tunes off the internet and create their own custom ring. The fedex guy thought it was great.
The cops just kick the door in.
it doesn't have the catchy logo nor the rounded corners!?!? Also isn't a cell phone covered by like 250,000 patents?
He's takin our Jerbs!!!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Not only will nobody try to steal that stack of electronics, but if they did try to mug you for it, you could hit them with it.
Besides removing that header connector, it could also have the USB connector desoldered, and one of those tiny wifi modules could be soldered directly on there, perhaps after having the connector part of the board cut down with a dremel. That would give you the option to do WiFi SIP as well as GSM.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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and now we all know his phone number!
I'd be pissed if my phone started ringing incessantly because it was in a video on /.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
That's a bit of a stretch... it doesn't even play Candy Crush.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
nt
The real question is, what will airport security think of it...?
So, really this is "Man Builds DIY Cellphone Using DIY Cellphone Module".
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
This is horrible. I've been away for about a year, and now I wish I had stayed away.
I'm sure there is better components out there but this is really cool and make me wonder if I could build my own 1960's Star Trek communicator at some point before I die and have that as my cell phone.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
By the way, this is not the first DIY mobile phone: here's a phone made out of Nokia N810 Internet Tablet: http://talk.maemo.org/showthre...
He bought premade modules and did something you've been able to do since just a few months after the RPi came out. Its been possible with Arduino shields for far longer.
Why exactly is this here? Just because the editors have no idea what articles their posting and have just realized that for way too much money you can make a really shitty cell phone?
I've got an arduino based cell phone buried in my desk somewhere, all using off the shelf modules, I'm pretty sure all of which I bought from radioshack though some may come from sparkfun just to save money. Its no more difficult than stacking some lego bricks together and moving an actuator with Lego Mindstorms.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You can buy an Arduino powered GBoard Pro for $58 with integrated SIM900 and add iTead Studio's LCD Display and do this without all the fuss. Just saying.
Lovely! Linux with complete access to the mic and speaker. Should be able to pair these up and have reasonably secure scrambled voice communications.
I built one using a picaxe + GSM module in 2010. It was pretty challenging fitting enough AT commands in the limited eeprom on the picaxe. Worked great on the protoboard but I never bothered making a PCB for what is really a pretty pointless device. Even in 2010 I could have bought a better phone for $20. GSM modules are really useful: using one to make a phone seems like a waste! They're much more interesting for things like remote monitoring or smart SMS-enabled devices...
sustainable living
OK, he needs to upgrade from that QVGA touchscreen to WVGA or something .. other than that it's not too bad for the price.
Would be better with a floppy raid attached for backup: http://www.wired.com/2009/05/f...
Actually a neat project but I wanted to be snarky...
NOT. I've seen a friend doing the same thing for his thesis(he was an undergraduate) back in 2006 were everything was more expensive(boards,controllers, various modules) and more primitive. Back then there were no IDEs for boards like arduino, you had very few libraries to work with and everything was done mostly by hand, I remember him building some of the circuits too(custom pcb with components like the gsm module), as some module were to expensive or had a strange shape and couldn't feet with the rest of the components.
is it that people who probably don't have the skills to do something like this, always say that it is rubbish? Geeze, give the man some credit for ingenuity, after all thinking like he does is how technology progress.
was when the olds kept turning up in the news. Another generation of hardware and software hackers have just learned to blink and LED and their imaginations are popping with the possibilities. Engineering is cool and I'm glad to see continuing interest in it. On the other hand, there is nothing newsworthy about this from either a technological nor an innovating standpoint. It has all been done before and it's about as difficult as using a serial port.
Can I get a /. for my "Man makes GPS with ATmega8" or "Man sends himself SMS messages with ARM Cortex M0" or maybe "Man makes PSX and USB gamepad with microcontroller" or "Kid mods own console by bit-banging SCEA over serial port." Uhhhh "College student builds 100MHz logic analyzer and VGA controller" etc.
Oh wait, I forgot I need to associate myself with a buzzword like Raspberry Pi, MIT, or Arduino to be relevant to the latest generation of nerds and thus newsworthy. Plugging a bunch of off-the-shelf modules together is something a 12 year old can do. News would be if somebody made a better calculator than the HP48G, not "ZOMG RPi WTFBBQ!!!?!?!"
Sent from his Rasberry Pi.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Apple is going to sue him so hard he'll think he's Samsung.
With the Pi, could there be some kind of scrambling or encrypted voice?
You can even here the distinctive radio interference GSM phones make at about 2:26. Whenever my clock radio makes that sound I know I'm about to get a text message.
I'm a second year student of Ethical Hacking. About a quarter of my class chose to do the "Raspberry Pi" project this year, where most of us successfully came up with basically that very same device (minus the touchscreen, our uni doesn't have any, although I can't imagine it would take us more than a couple of weeks of hacking at it to have decent touchscreen support). Mine also has Metasploit and can launch attacks in response to phone call/SMS :)
So yeah about 20 second year students this year, probably about 20 in each batch previous years for a few years did this. We didn't make it to Slashdot :'(
Using off the shelf components to clone existing functionality is boring. What would be much better is to build a secure mesh network phone. Sure, it would take a bunch of them to be very useful, but you have to start somewhere. Start with local capability that would work in your college dorm or something. And make sure it's end-to-end encrypted from the start. There's something that could be world changing. Kickstart it if necessary.