New GTA02s (was WIKI is in read-only mode?)

[Michael Spacefalcon]

Radek Polak <psonek2 at seznam.cz> wrote:

> But one day your GTA02 will stop working - it might fall on the floor or 
> whatever. GTA04 is only replacement -

Although it may be the only available replacement at the present
moment, it shouldn't remain that way for long.  We, the FreeCalypso
community (see below), need to make an effort to produce a new
GTA02-like phone, Calypso-based.

The first naive thought would be to contract with some pirate
manufacturing company to make verbatim unauthorized clones of the
GTA02, by reverse-engineering the GTA02 PCB and copying it verbatim,
layer for layer, trace for trace, via for via.  But it probably
wouldn't be the wisest choice in technical terms, even if all of the
components were still readily available (which they aren't) - the
GTA02 board includes some really stupid design choices which I would
want to get rid of if we're going to the trouble of building new
boards - the Glamo being first and foremost.

Because the single most important feature I seek to retain from the
GTA02 is the Calypso, we will probably still need to send a dead GTA02
PCB to a pirate manufacturing / reverse eng shop to recover the PCB
layout withheld by Closedmoko-Inc.  (We already have the schematics
for the Calypso block, TI's Leonardo reference design, but the
corresponding PCB layout is currently missing.)  As for the rest of
the GTA02 board, i.e., the AP realm, I would want to simplify it quite
a bit - take the Glamo, Wifi and BT out, connect the audio directly to
the Iota (Calypso's analog part) so that nothing on the AP side needs
to remain powered during a long voice call, and if the original
Samsung AP is no longer available (which is probably the case),
replace it with whatever other AP we can find that does the minimal
functionality we need using the least amount of battery power.

The Calypso chips themselves can still be obtained on the grey market.
And once that supply runs out, we'll need to send a Spetsnaz unit into
whatever TI facility has the old IC fabrication masks, seize those,
and take them to some Chinese fab to restart the production of those
chips.

> that's why it's important to support 
> GTA04 - either by donation or buying the device.

Not being Calypso-based, the GTA04 is a massive downgrade from the
GTA02, and can't really be seen as a replacement except a very feeble
one.

Therefore, anyone who wishes his/her phone to be a *phone*, rather
than a PDA or whatever, who sees the GSM processor as the most
important part of the phone, rather than some unimportant "modem", and
for whom the concept of a Free Phone means running fully source-enabled
firmware on the actual phone (GSM baseband) processor, should NOT waste
his/her money on a GTA04 downgrade, and should instead donate to the
FreeCalypso project - the latter will need to raise funds to pay for
the professional pirate-manuf reverse engineering of the GTA02 PCB, to
buy Calypso chips on the grey market, and to build the actual new
Calypso phones.

The firmware will be the user's choice of FreeCalypso or OsmocomBB.  I
choose the former, but others can use whatever they like.

> Maybe i am wrong but openmoko as company is for years dead and nobody of the 
> old admins is willing to spend much time on maintaining the infrastructure. I 
> guess the number of spammers is now 1000x higher the number of contributors, 
> that's why it's readonly. And it's no wonder that GTA04 has separate wiki 
> because of these reasons.

Dr. HNS of Golden Delicious has been saying for quite a while now that
with Openmoko being effectively dead, the Openmoko community is in
need of a new successor/replacement, and that successor/replacement is
OpenPhoenux.

I agree with the first part, but not the second.  There is not one but
TWO camps seeking to continue the work of Openmoko in different
directions: one is OpenPhoenux, the other is FreeCalypso.

In order to become a bona fide new community, FreeCalypso needs its
own web presence, its own wiki and its own mailing list.  I already
have a set of physical servers in my own sovereign micronation, all
that remains to be done is the software setup - sysadmin stuff.  I
will post an announcement when the new FreeCalypso community home is
up.

VLR,
SF