Solution to the shortage of Calypso devices

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Harald Welte laforge at gnumonks.org
Wed Oct 19 20:19:31 UTC 2016


Hi Mychaela,

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:07:26AM -0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:

> I believe to be the proper solution to the shortage and the crippled
> nature of all pre-existing Calypso devices: a new Calypso board.

To be fair: It is *a* solution, unfortunately not one accessible to all
people.  The price of the C1xx phones at the height of their
availability some 5 years ago was in the range of 10-20 USD, which is
something never achievable with any new board if not only due to the
economics of scale.

> Back in 2012 Harald Welte posted here saying that his company was
> going to be making a new Calypso board for the very same purpose of
> addressing the shortage and the deficiencies of pre-existing devices,

I will re-read the mails, but as far as I remember it, there was some
intention and some plans, but I do not recall having made a firm
committment that we definitely will do it.  As usual, life happens and
there are many other interesting projects to work on.  I personally and
"my" company have been working ever since to create more and more FOSS
for cellular communications - with a focus on the network /
infrastructure side.

> but as far as I know, no such product has ever been produced - nor do
> I know if whoever was behind that project even got as far as creating
> the design for it.

I know of one company who has created a proprietary calypso-based
design (not for public sale), but neither I nor sysmocom were involved
in that.

> Fast-forwarding to the present, we now have a ready-to-build design
> for a Calypso development board called FCDEV3B, which stands for
> FreeCalypso development board, triband.  

This is great news.  I have been occasionally following your efforts,
and it is great to see those efforts culminating at this point.

> Back in 2012 Harald was saying that he was only going to release PDF
> schematics but not the full design files for his board; I feel
> differently about such matters, 

This is a misrepresentation.  I do not "feel" differently.  The point
was simply that at that time, Openmoko Inc still existed, and there
was confidentiality on the GSM modem part of the GTA01/GTA02 phone
designs.  So I simply didn't have any authority to decide on that, no
matter wat my feelings were.

It's great that you got permission to disclose that layout - three years
later.

> Now we need to get these boards physically made, and toward that end I
> have started a crowdfunding campaign:
> 
> https://www.gofundme.com/fcdev3b-board-production-2umevjw

Great!  I have pitched USD 450 in to see how this bord turns out in
reality.  I think it should be relatively easy to get 9 more people
chip in to turn this into realaity.

We also still have 100 units of calypso, iota and rita chips in stock at
sysmocom, which we'd happily donate to your project if you were
interested.

Regards,
	Harald
-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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