In this instructible, [wkter] takes us through the process of running a Nokia 3310 LCD display using an ATmega8. This instructible isn’t a beginners project as he assumes you already have a strong understanding of how to work with these components and their programming languages. He is very thorough with information though, providing datasheets, pinout diagrams, and source code. Once you get this down, you could go a little further and make Conway’s game of life.
Electronic conference badges are an integral part of our culture, and have featured many times here. The norm for a badge is an exquisitely designed printed circuit board with some kind of microcontroller circuit on it, often a display, and some LEDs.
This is not enough though for [Mastro Gippo], for he has given us an interesting alternative, the shell of a Nokia 3310 mobile phone fitted with a new motherboard holding an ESP32 module, and of course that classic display. It is to be the badge for IHC Camp, which initialism if you hadn’t guessed stands for Italian Hacker Camp, and which will run from the 2nd to the 5th of August 2018 in Padova, Italy. It’s worth reminding readers, at the time of writing IHC tickets are still available, so get ’em while they’re hot!
The board itself is a beautiful piece of work, and aside from the Nokia’s keyboard and display it holds the ESP module and an STM32F103 microcontroller that handles all the peripherals. There is no microphone, after all this is a badge rather than a phone, but there is space for a LoRa module. He’s done another fascinating post about the PCB design, including the on-board wireless antenna.
We have seen a lot about badges from the #BadgeLife scene surrounding the USA’s DEFCON courtesy of our colleague [Brian Benchoff], so it is particularly interesting to see badges from the opposite side of the Atlantic. This is an artform whose journey still has a way to go, and we’ll be along for the ride!
Apparently I’m on a nokia 3310 LCD kick. [Coniferous] submitted this nice little pic project/nokia LCD implimentation. It uses a DS18B20 temperature sensor, a PIC 12F629 and of course, nokia guts. (We’ve gotten enough of these that I’m starting to consider a Nokia LCD hacks category.) The parts count is really low – this could easily be encased
I was poking around and ran across this interesting mod in progress. It’s mostly a study in customizing an old laptop, but embedding a Nokia LCD in the palm rest is an interesting little hack. The LCD was taken from a Nokia 3310 and modded to connect to the parallel port. (Probably with a circuit like this one)
In their monthly announcement, among all the cool things Pine64, they talked about the open firmware for PinePhone’s LTE modem. The firmware isn’t fully open – a few parts remain closed. And Pine emphasizes that they neither pre-install nor officially endorse this firmware, and PinePhones will keep shipping with the vendor-supplied modem firmware image instead.
That said, the new firmware is way more featureful – it has less bugs, more features, decreased power consumption, and its proprietary parts are few and far between. I’d like to note that, with a special build of this firmware, the PinePhone’s modem can run Doom – because, well, of course.
And with all that, it’s become way easier to install this firmware – there’s fwupd hooks now! You can think of fwupd as the equivalent of Windows Update for firmware, except not abusive, and aimed at Linux. A perfect fit for keeping your open-source devices as functional as they can be, in other words.
What’s the deal? If open firmware is that much cooler, why don’t more of our phones have open firmware options available? Continue reading “Open Firmware For PinePhone LTE Modem – What’s Up With That?”
Many of us hackers have a longing for numpad-adorned mobile phones. We also have a shared understanding that, nowadays, such a phone has to be open and Linux-powered. Today’s project, Notkia, is the most promising and realistic effort at building a keypad phone that fits our requirements. Notkia is a replacement board for Nokia 168x series phones, equipped with an improved display, USB-C, WiFi, Bluetooth, and LoRa — and [Reimu NotMoe] of [SudoMaker] tells us this project’s extensive story.
The Notkia effort started over two years ago, because of [Reimu]’s increasing dislike for modern smartphones — something every hacker is familiar with. Her first-hand experience with privacy violations and hackability limitations on Android phones is recounted in detail, leading to a strong belief that there are fundamental problems with phones available nowadays. Building new hardware from the ground up seems to be the way forward. Two years later, this is exactly what we got!
Continue reading “Notkia: Building An Open And Linux-Powered Numpad Phone”
Ecclesiastes 1:9 reads “What has been will be again, what has done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Or in other words, 5G is mostly marketing nonsense; like 4G, 3G, and 2G was before it. Let’s not forget LTE, 4G LTE, Advance 4G, and Edge.
Technically, 5G means that providers could, if they wanted to, install some EHF antennas; the same kind we’ve been using forever to do point to point microwave internet in cities. These frequencies are too lazy to pass through a wall, so we’d have to install these antennas in a grid at ground level. The promised result is that we’ll all get slightly lower latency tiered internet connections that won’t live up to the hype at all. From a customer perspective, about the only thing it will do is let us hit the 8Gb ceiling twice as faster on our “unlimited” plans before they throttle us. It might be nice on a laptop, but it would be a historically ridiculous assumption that Verizon is going to let us tether devices to their shiny new network without charging us a million Yen for the privilege.
So, what’s the deal? From a practical standpoint we’ve already maxed out what a phone needs. For example, here’s a dirty secret of the phone world: you can’t tell the difference between 1080p and 720p video on a tiny screen. I know of more than one company where the 1080p on their app really means 640 or 720 displayed on the device and 1080p is recorded on the cloud somewhere for download. Not a single user has noticed or complained. Oh, maybe if you’re looking hard you can feel that one picture is sharper than the other, but past that what are you doing? Likewise, what’s the point of 60fps 8k video on a phone? Or even a laptop for that matter?
Are we really going to max out a mobile webpage? Since our device’s ability to present information exceeds our ability to process it, is there a theoretical maximum to the size of an app? Even if we had Gbit internet to every phone in the world, from a user standpoint it would be a marginal improvement at best. Unless you’re a professional mobile game player (is that a thing yet?) latency is meaningless to you. The buffer buffs the experience until it shines.
So why should we care about billion dollar corporations racing to have the best network for sending low resolution advertising gifs to our disctracto cubes? Because 5G is for robots.
