Hi everyone. I'm admittedly more a lurker than an active participant in this project. I find it very fascinating and regard its objectives as important.
I recently watched several of the C3 presentations, from this and previous years. Having open, documented hardware and software seems to be an important goal in itself. Just knowing about all the potential weaknesses in the software stacks of most phones, as well as hidden "features" like SMS messages that could, theoretically, do things like remotely enable the phone mic, among other things (things that are certainly technically possible, and also due to the closed nature of the software, completely unknown) are of grave concern to me.
Now, given that the supported phone hardware is old and not reliably available, I was wondering if anyone knows if the Calypso and other chips in these old phones are still available for new designs? How much interest would there be, say, in an open, but VERY SIMPLE, actual phone? Kind of like the Pandora project, but without the ambition to make the most advanced portable game player possible.
The Osmocom software would then be very easily portable to such a device. Given the seemingly widespread interest and enthusiasm for the Osmocom, OpenBTS, and OpenBSC projects, a real, genuinely open phone (not a pseudo-open phone like the FreeRunner) might possibly have enough interest, and be buildable for a low-enough cost, to merit further discussion.
Anyone want to discuss this?
Hi,
just to reflect my own thoughts on this topic:
On 14.01.2011 14:39, Scott Weisman wrote:
Now, given that the supported phone hardware is old and not reliably available, I was wondering if anyone knows if the Calypso and other chips in these old phones are still available for new designs? How much interest would there be, say, in an open, but VERY SIMPLE, actual phone? Kind of like the Pandora project, but without the ambition to make the most advanced portable game player possible.
This is more or the less the GSM Devel-Board idea [1] that Harald wanted to pursue initially, with the difference that it would have used a custom DSP and not the Calypso. But even if you don't take in account the time and money it takes to do a proper pcb- and especially RF-design, this is definitely something you don't want to do with the Calypso (which is EOL and not available for new designs, although you might get it still in the semiconductor grey-market).
But what would be the benefit of all this? The Compal-phones are still available in huge quantities (see aliexpress.com for example, new Motorola C118 for $19.79 including world-wide shipping). You surely won't beat that price with your hardware. And it still isn't really 'open', since you have e.g. the proprietary DSP code.
It might make a bit more sense with MediaTek baseband chips (once supported) if you want to do something out-of-spec with them, but even there you have thousands of different phones readily available.
Just my 2 cents...
Regards, Steve
Dear Scott,
On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 03:39:23PM +0200, Scott Weisman wrote:
I was wondering if anyone knows if the Calypso and other chips in these old phones are still available for new designs?
Not from TI, it is end of life for a long time. However, you can certainly buy the Calypso/Iota/Rita from the 'grey market', i.e. the various surplus semiconductor traders in Asia.
At least one year ago when I last inquired, I could have easily bought something like 10,000 of those old chipsets.
The biggest challenge is to find all the other required parts, like SAW filters with the right impedance and mechanical footprint, and find a stable source of them where you don't have to change your PCB layout every time you produce another batch of the phones.
We were considering doing something like this (custom hardware) using the hardware design of the GSM modem of the Freerunner as a basis. However, when we found that you could still buy the Motorola/Compal phones in batches of thousands one year ago, we decided not to pursue down that road.
Doing a hardware design of this complexity, and building it, including production testing and calibration is not something you are likely to do as a one or two-man show in your spare time (which OsmocomBB was a year ago).
Also, if you actually ship a device consisting of hardware + software, you easily run into regulatory issues like the RT&TTE directive in the EU, since suddenly you're now selling an end-user consumer device and thus have to comply with regulatory requirements.
Just distributing software is not falling under that directive, and thus no certification / regulatory requirement is needed. Same goes for measurement/lab equipment like the USRP.
How much interest would there be, say, in an open, but VERY SIMPLE, actual phone?
Definitely by far not enough interest to ever justify the many man-weeks and months spent in doing a hardware design, writing production testing software, getting the tooling done for the plastics, etc.
What I find much more valuable is to put effort into porting OsmocomBB to the Mediatek MTK62xx chipsets. There are hundreds of millions of phones in the market already, and close to 100 million new ones are shipping per quarter.
This way, once again the focus is where it should be: creating and improving the Free Software GSM protocol stack, creating a simple UI on top.
No need to design, test, produce and verify a hardware design from scratch, worry about mechanical issues, etc. Plus, you benefit from the fact that the devices are available at a price to which you will never get (large scale production), and the hardware design has been verified.
The Osmocom software would then be very easily portable to such a device. Given the seemingly widespread interest and enthusiasm for the Osmocom, OpenBTS, and OpenBSC projects,
I think you may need to re-calibrate your perception. Please look at the actual number of people who have contributed to the source code of all those projects together. You will find it is very few, and the same names pop up everywhere.
Growing the user base without growing the developer base is not something I think we should put in such an enormous effort as running our own hardware design.
Regards, Harald
Thanks everyone for the clarification. I didn't realize there were so many of the Calypso phones still available *new*. I was only aware of eBay and some obscure Polish auction site. Now that I know they are available in single quantities from AliExpress, that's a whole different scenario.
With those kinds of quantities, you are all correct that there is no need to even think about a hardware design.
Thanks for all the feedback and keep up the great work!
Scott
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Steve Markgraf