Very much still in progress (As you might be able to see :) ). My goal is to make a Nokia phone as if it is made in 2025 (or 202X kinda running out of time there and im not even sure how long it will take me) With USB-C, 4G (5G is not planned for reasons), 1TB+ of expandable Storage. I have already sent my first SMS/Call (a call without a mic or speaker to be precise…)
Phones just do too much these days. And I don’t get the feeling they respect my time nor privacy. They are also pretty boring as they all look the same. On top of that the current landscape of “dumb phones” consist of expensive phones you could hang in a art gallery, ugly phones with big ass buttons for seniors or inefficient un-optimized phones running android. I wanna change that.
In my experience the hard part is to make it have low enough consumption to be ableable to run on batteries without draining them too quickly.
You’ll probably have to ditch the one or more of the boards and replace them with the just the components (in the case of the GSM one, the module) which can be a bit complex to begin with if the board is generating its own voltage for the components and you don’t know how to do it yet (look into voltage boost converters - probably needed for the GSM module - and buck converters - the most efficient way to get 3.3V from a LiPo battery - as you can find plenty of chips that do most of the work for you)
That said the ESP32 is very easy to run on its own once you have the 3.3V it needs - if I remember it correctly you need all of a single 10k Ohm external resistor to make sure RESET is pulled up - and you can still program it with the Arduino framework.
Once you’re ready try designing your own circuit board with something like Kicad and have it done in one of the cheap Chinese retail circuit board makers like JLCPCB.
Yea, you are probably right. I did run it from a LiPo battery once as a testdrive, but the soldering was so sketchy I am too scared of leaving it like that :)… so I am not sure how long it would last with the dev boards in use + I have it connect to my computer most of the time anyways.
I will definitely have to learn how to design my own PCBs. I am sketching one with the dev boards on KiCAD just to get a feel for that. But want to try to completely transfer one of those dev boards as they are open source and see if I can swap them out without a problem.
I did look for PCBs makers in Europe to cut down on shipping costs, but its crazy how expensive they are, especially for prototyping. I really don’t get that, as I would assume that the process without QA and packaging is completely automatic these days…
I’ve compared a few of the ones I’ve caught mention of in videos. Have you checked jlcpcb?
Yep, i have now. They are crazy cheap. Even including shipping. I will probably go with something like that, at least in the prototyping phase. Kinda wish the EU would invest more into chip and PCB manufacturing, not like the demand is going away any time soon…