A while ago, while my wife and I were doing that Modern Canadian Task we all love: What to do now that the cellphone contract is over?
I’ve been unhappy with the current cellphone/smrtphone/handheld computer options for a while, and have looked into building my own in various and sundry ways, but never got one done. With the end of the contract and the ability to do WTF we wanted with our old Blackberry’s and the contract, I thought I’d look again at the offerings available online. And that’s when I came across the RePhone Kickstarter.
The RePhone is DIY a Cellphone kit built around Seeed Studio‘s Xadow GSM+BLE board, an Audio board and a touchscreen. The Xadow line also provides various other desired sensors or abilities, including NFC and GPS. The “phone” bits are concentrated on the main board, along with a battery connector (and built in charger), a slot for the nano-sim and a tiny external antenna.
Earlier this year my Kickstarter stuff finally arrived, and I’ve had a few weeks playing around with it. In a word: Awesome!
The cellphone you create is very basic. The address book and most settings/configurations are stored in text files. They’re stored, with any ring tones (Not Included!) and other files, on the flash storage, which you can access by plugging the battery in, then plugging the USB into the computer, but leave the GSM module OFF. The SMS messages the phone sends are pre-written in their own text file, and merely selected to be used on the phone itself. You can choose to dial any number and not just a number pre-programmed into your address book, however.
The phone also comes with support for the Xadow Basic Sensor module, through both a separate screen that outputs the sensor’s readings as well as integration into the If-This-Then-That basic scripting system.
The ITTT, under the “If” button, is a series of basic logical questions that, if satisfied will perform an action. Say if the temperature gets to cold, send an sms message. The FIRST thing you should do when you want to use the thing as a phone and not just play around with it are setup 2 of these ITTT statements:
- If <incoming phone call> THEN PLAY <the ringtone mp3 you copied>
- If <incoming sms> THEN PLAY <the sms tone / ringtone mp3 you copied>
[Yes, there’s no ring-this-phone logic built in. Screens do show on screen, but no noise is made.]
There are other things to use the ITTT for, especially if you have other Xadow modules to use for output or data gathering.
There’s also an “Action” menu item. This allows you to interact with a few more of the Xadow modules, as well as to play the mp3 files you may have uploaded to the flash memory.
Finally there’s “Settings”, which controls the brightness of the screen and the volume of the audio output.
The RePhone interface itself is programmed in Eclipse, an IDE/Environment I’ve never used before, but I wanted to get started so I downloaded it and started playing around. The modules can also be programmed via the Arduino IDE, so I downloaded that and set it up as well. I’ll talk more about the modifications in another post.
I’m still waiting for a nano-sim cutter to be delivered (slow boat I guess), so I haven’t had a chance to test any of the cellphone capabilities yet. Hopefully soon!
I’ve also got plans for some hardware expansions, including wiring up a headphone/mic jack, and making it wearable, but right now I’m still just playing around with all the basics!
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