open-source smartphone

2 Articles

MikroPhone – Open, Secure, Simple Smartphone

October 2, 2024 by 27 Comments

Modern smartphones try and provide a number of useful features to their users, and yet, they’re not exactly designed with human needs in mind. A store-bought smartphone will force a number of paradigms and features onto you no matter whether you want them, and, to top it off, it will encroach on your privacy and sell your data. It’s why self-built and hacker-friendly smartphone projects keep popping up, and the MikroPhone project fills a new niche for sure, with its LTE connectivity making it a promising option for all hackers frustrated with the utter state of smartphones today.

MikroPhone is open-source in every single aspect possible, and it’s designed to be privacy-friendly and easy to understand. At its core is a SiFive Freedom E310, a powerful RISC-V microcontroller – allowing for a feature phone-like OS that is easy to audit and hard to get bogged down by. You’re not limited to a feature phone OS, however – on the PCB, you will find a slot for an NXP i.MX8M-based module that can run a Linux-based mobile OS of your choice. MikroPhone’s display and touchscreen are shared between the Linux module and the onboard MCU, a trick that reminds us of the MCH2022 badge – you get as much “smartphone” as you currently need, no more, no less.

The cool features at MikroPhone’s core don’t end here. The MikroPhone has support for end-to-end encrypted communications, kept to its feature-phone layer, making for a high bar of privacy protection – even when the higher-power module might run an OS that you don’t necessarily fully trust. Currently, MikroPhone is a development platform, resembling the PinePhone’s Project Don’t Be Evil board back when PinePhone was just starting out, and just like with PinePhone, it wouldn’t be hard to minify this platform into a pocket-friendly form-factor, either. The PinePhone has famously become a decent smartphone replacement option in the hacker world, even helping kick off a few mobile OS projects and resulting in a trove of hacks to grace our pages.

An Open Source Mobile Phone Based On The ESP32

August 24, 2023 by 34 Comments

As microcontrollers become ever faster and cheaper, something we’ve been expecting has been an open source smartphone based not upon a high-end chip, but on a cheap commodity one. In the electronic badge arena we’ve come pretty close, but perhaps it’s left to [Gabriel Rochet] to deliver the first one that brings everything together. His Paxo phone is now on version 4, and while the French-language website link stubbornly resists translation with Google translate, English speakers can find a description of its capabilities along with the software in a GitHub repository.

The hardware is surprisingly straightforward, with a resistive touch screen and a PCB featuring power management, an ESP32 main processor, and a GSM module. The 2G connectivity may not be the fastest, or even available in your country, but otherwise the feature set looks more than reasonable for a basic mobile phone.

We like this project a lot, because as we said it starts to deliver on the promise of the 2018 EMF badge and the 2022 MCH badge. We think the former badge’s designers might find something of interest in it.