RePhone Keyboard Hack.

So, I posted before about the RePhone stuff I’ve been playing with but here I’ll talk about one specific deficiency and the fix I’ve programmed and released to the wild.

The RePhone Kit Create software (source code on github) provides a very basic cellphone and Xadow module interface. By default, it provides the following interfaces:

• Sim Card Status
• Battery Status
• Time/Date (set manually)
• Display Xadow Sensor Board readings (if present, blank if not)
• Actions menu:
  • Light up the LED Strip hooked up to the Xadow V2 Duino with one of 3 pre-programmed patterns,
  • Light up the Xadow v2 LED board with one of a bunch of pre-programmed characters,
  • Play audio files stored in the root of the flash storage,
• If-That-Then-This menu, where you can set up ITTT functions. You can trigger and respond via any of the other supported phone functions, including Xadow modules and SMS messages.
• Phone Functions:
  • Call address book number
  • Type in a one-time number to dial
• SMS/Message Functions:
  • Select number from address book, or type in a one-time number
  • Select pre-typed message to send
• Settings:
  • Screen Brightness, from 1-6
  • Speaker Volume, from 1-6

Now, you’ll notice there’s no ability to edit the address book, or save typed-in numbers, or type in new SMS messages. The address book and message list are text files that must be edited while the RePhone is plugged into a computer.

(With a bit of research about the Xadow V2 modules [that the RePhone connects to] you’ll also realise that the phone’s software only really supports the sensor & light modules, but that’s another project/post.)

So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I’d gotten the RePhone for the purposes of hacking the software and hardware anyway, so this missing functionality gave me the perfect target to try and learn with. I followed the instructions for installing the Eclipse IDE, downloaded the source and started playing around.

After I made it work well for myself (given that I don’t have a SIM card yet and so can’t actually send any messages to test, but it looks like it should work OK), I thought this would be a good time for me to share my changes with the world. I posted to the RePhone Forums about the keyboard, and there was some interest, so I setup my new GitHub site with a fork of the Kit source code.

The keyboard is implemented using the phone-pad code. It’s a 4 column, 4 row keyboard, with < and > keys in the bottom-left and bottom-right to swap between the 4 pages that are currently setup to implement the keyboard itself. The typed string is shared between the 4 pages, then when the checkmark button is pressed that string is put into the list of available SMS messages.

I haven’t had any feedback so far, I’m hoping I didn’t miss anything in the rest of the code about how the sms is done, I’ll of course be doing my own testing as soon as my SIM cutter gets delivered by Canada Post. Let me know if anyone has issues!