homebrew hardware and WiFi

adrian cockcroft adrian.cockcroft at gmail.com
Sun Feb 18 10:02:15 CET 2007


Hello, I'm new to the OpenMoko lists, but I'm a member of the Silicon
Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club that started up last year at
http://www.hbmobile.org . We have been working towards our own family
of hardware designs, based mostly on http://www.gumstix.com processor
boards, and will be adopting and contributing to whatever software
seems useful. We are very happy that the Trolltech Greenphone and the
OpenMoko project seem to have kick started an open source community
around mobile phone applications, we already have Greenphone-toting
members and several of us plan to get OpenMoko's when they ship to
developers.

Homebrew hardware takes the open phone concept one step further, and
uses exclusively components that can be fully documented and specified
without needing a manufacturer NDA. We are publishing our designs as
we get them done, and I've been playing around with one-off case
designs that can be produced on a 3D printer, to accomodate any LCD
size and feature set - which has become known as the "my phone"
project :-)

There is a WiFi and Bluetooth combo card available here that some of
us intend to use:
http://www.embeddedworks.net/newsite/WLAN/oem_sip_80211g.html

So if you want different design features than the Neo1973 offers, you
really can go build it yourself rather than grumbling about it on the
lists. It should be possible to run most of the OpenMoko software,
especially if you stay with the same screen resolution etc. Homebrew
designs are harder to minaturize so it works best with bigger format
designs  based around 3.7" or 4.3" LCDs.

Open phones are an idea who's time has come, we look forward to
working together..

Cheers Adrian




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