Firmware Modding Your Vintage Nokia Handset

September 13, 2021 by Chris Wilkinson 9 Comments

These days we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to smartphone software, especially games. Official repositories for the leading handsets feature hundreds of thousands of games, and sideloading adds infinite possibilities. If you were lucky enough to be sporting a Nokia handset in the late 1990s, you probably had all of three games to choose from (and only one that was actually fun). [Janus Cycle] explores the steps needed to firmware mod your vintage Nokia phone, and how to expand on that paltry games library.

Enthusiasts have been modding their Nokia handsets since the 2000s, and the tools required now are the same as they were then. The Nokia 5110 and 6110 (as featured in the video below) use a proprietary cable and connector for communicating with PCs and other devices. Nokia’s official serial cable already opens up many possibilities for handset tinkering, including access to RAM and toggling Monitor Mode. This cable interfaces solely with the phone’s fast FBUS protocol, however firmware flashing takes place using the slower MBUS protocol over a single wire bi-directional pin.

The handset expects both serial ports to be available during firmware flashing. [Janus Cycle] demonstrates how to build a custom harness that connects both serial ports to a PC parallel port. At this point the flashing process is relatively straightforward, especially if you have an appropriately vintage computer to run the old flashing software.

Nokia owners may fondly remember changing the network name on the home screen to all sorts of inappropriate graphics, yet far more was possible with the right technology and know-how. It’s interesting to think about what may have been if softmodding was more widespread during the reign of the Nokia 5110 and its peers.

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LoRa Messenger In Nokia’s Shell

June 26, 2021 by Jenny List 30 Comments

The arrival of LoRa a few years ago gave us at last an accessible licence-free UHF communication protocol with significant range. It’s closed-source, but there are plenty of modules available so it’s found its way into a variety of projects in our community over the years. Among them we’ve seen a few messaging devices, but none quite so slick as [Trevor Attema]’s converted Nokia E63 BlackBerry-like smartphone. The original motherboard with its cellphone radio and Symbian-running processor have been tossed aside, and in its place is a new motherboard that hooks into the Nokia LCD, keypad, backlighting and speaker. To all intents and purposes from the outside it’s a Nokia phone, but one that has been expertly repurposed as a messenger.

On the PCB alongside a LoRa module is an STM32H7 microcontroller and an ATECC608 secure authentication chip for encrypted messages. It’s designed to form a mesh network, further extending the range across which a group can operate.

We like this project for the quality of the work, but we especially like it for the way it uses the Nokia’s components. We’ve asked in the past why people aren’t hacking smartphones, but maybe we’re asking the wrong question. If the smartphone as a unit isn’t useful, then how about its case, components, and form factor? Perhaps a black-brick Android phone will yield little, but the previous generation such as this Nokia use parts that are easy to interface with and well understood. Let’s hope it encourages more experimentation.

Fix Your Nokia’s White Screen Of Death

May 9, 2021 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Today the Nokia brand can be found on a range of well-screwed-together Androind phones and a few feature phones, but as older readers will remember that before their descent into corporate chaos and the Windows Phone wilderness, there was once a time when the Finnish manufacturer dominated the mobile phone landscape and produced some of the most innovative and creative handset designs ever created. It’s for some of these that [Michael Fitzmayer] has done some work providing tools revive the devices from an unfortunate bricking.

The N-Gage was the phone giant’s attempt to produce a handset that doubled as a handheld game console, and though it was a commercial failure at the time it has retained a following among enthusiasts. The flaw comes as its Symbian operating system fills its user partition, at which point the infamous “White Screen Of Death” occurs as the device can no longer reboot. Rewriting the flash chip used to be handled by Nokia service tools, but these can no longer be found. His fix substitutes a “Blue pill” STMF103-based dev board that connects to the Nokia FBus serial port and does its job. It’s possible that it could be used on other Symbian devices, but for now it’s only been tested on the N-Gages.

It’s easy to forget when a smartphone is defined by iOS and Android, that Symbian gave us a smartphone experience for the previous decade. For those of us who still pine for their miniaturised Carl Zeiss Tessar cameras and candybar form factors, it’s good to see them receiving some love.

Thanks [Razvan] for the tip.

Spacing Out: A Big Anniversary, Starlink Failures Plummet, Lunar Cellphones, And A Crewed Launch

November 11, 2020 by Jenny List 32 Comments

After a couple of months away we’re returning with our periodic roundup of happenings in orbit, as we tear you away from Star Trek: Discovery and The Mandalorian, and bring you up to date with some highlights from the real world of space. We’ve got a launch to look forward to this week, as well as a significant anniversary.

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Old Phone, New Remote Switch

July 21, 2018 by Jenny List 38 Comments

With mobile phones now ubiquitous for the masses in much of the world for over two decades, something a lot of readers will be familiar with is a drawer full of their past devices. Alongside the older smartphone you’ll have a couple of feature phones, and probably at the bottom a Nokia candybar or a Motorola flip phone. There have been various attempts over the years to make use of the computing power the more recent ones contain through using their smartphone operating systems, but the older devices remain relatively useless.

[Vishwasnavada] has a neat plan though, using an ancient phone as a remote trigger device, by interfacing it with an Arduino. There are many ways this could be achieved depending on the model of the phone in question, but one thing common to nearly all devices is a vibration motor. Removing the motor and taking its power line to a GPIO allows the Arduino to sense when the phone is ringing. The idea then is that a call can be placed to the phone which is not picked up, but because it triggers the vibration motor it can be used to make the microcontroller do something remotely. A hack with limited capabilities then, but one that is cheap and simple, uses a recycled device, and should work almost anywhere populated on the planet given the global reach of 2G networks.

This isn’t the first respin of a classic Nokia we’ve brought you, they will also talk data.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Retrofit A Nokia

September 12, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 41 Comments

The Nokia 3210 is the greatest cell phone ever made. The battery lasted for days, custom color covers were available at every mall kiosk, it had the Snake game, and the chassis for this phone was finely crafted out of the crust of neutron stars. It was indestructible; it is the reason we now appreciate technology over more impermanent concepts like relationships and love.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Bastian] is bringing the Nokia 3210 into this century. He’s designing a circuit board with the same footprint, the same button layout, and a better screen that drops right into the lovely plastic enclosure of the 3210.

The current BOM for the upgraded 3210 includes an STM32 F7 microcontroller, which is more or less the current top of the line ARM micro you can get. For wireless, [Bastian] is using an A7 GSM/GPRS module and an ESP8266 for a little bit of WiFi. For a dumbphone, this is ludicrously overpowered. Provided [Bastian] gets a prototype up and running, there will be some interesting applications for a device this powerful in a package this indestructible.

One of the things [Bastian] has been butting his head against with this project is KiCad. Microvias don’t work like they should in KiCad — they’re restricted to the outer layers only. This is a problem for routing a complex board like this, so [Bastian] wrote a patch that gives KiCad an ‘I know what I’m doing mode’ for microvias everywhere.

This is truly the spirit of The Hackaday Prize: not only is [Bastian] building something ridiculous, he’s also creating the tools to do it.

Live Counter Revives Old Nokia Phone’s Utility

February 4, 2017 by James Hobson 7 Comments

Old hardware you may have on hand cannot only inspire projects in their own right, but can facilitate the realization of any ideas you have been planning. Using a Nokia N900, [MakerMan] concocted a light-up sign with a live subscriber and view count of his videos.

[MakerMan] milled out the logo used on the sign with his DIY CNC machine — built from rotary bearings and recycled stepper motors off industrial Xerox printers. The meticulous application of a jigsaw, rotary tool, and grinder resulted in a sturdy frame for the sign while a few strips of RGB LEDs imbue it with an inspiring glow. All that was left was to mount the phone in place and tape it for good measure.

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