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I found the PiPhone accidentally a little while back. At first I just thought of it as a way to finally repurpose my raspberry pi; I have never really felt happy with it and it requires blogs. My current mobile certainly does me no justice for freedom since I currently have the stock Android, though I run F-droid.

But then I remembered the PocketChip, a very libre friendly project. At this point I know little about the OS, except that it looks like Debian. Forgive my ignorance, please, because it will probably get worse before it gets better. For a working mobile, it looks like I would only need the radio system, a controller UI, a link between them, and cables and power. At first I did not realize that the GSM modules contained the aural connectors. I thought the controller UI, in the PiPhone case the Raspberry Pi, needed to handle all SMS and voice. However, the GSM module, which super encapsulates both the radio connections and the voice, already has IO built onto most boards.

Thus the last crucial piece comes down to the link between the radio and the controller. I have had some issues with USB to serial in the past. But all of this Arduino technology looks much nicer than the proprietary systems I have previously programmed.

The hardware store down the street has plenty of high voltage outlet boxes that I can easily repurpose for a crude housing for the radio. After that, I only need to afix the PocketChip once I have one. By the time I finish the prototype it will probably look worse than a mobile or wireless phone from the 1980s.

Depending on the actual module, I might reuse climberhunt's program. At worse, at first I will just create a command line interface and then add a GUI on top of that later. Though I think evetually I would like to abstract the controller UI into something that will work with a set of GSM modules.

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