Ever wanted to make a smartphone of your own? Don't have the parts, metals, or FCC clearance to do it? Well, RePhone is here to help, enabling you to make a phone out of anything you want.
RePhone is essentially a project designed to help users build their own tiny phones, with kits including a small circuit board, a SIM card slot, and a screen, which is optional. Not only that, but it also has Bluetooth support. All of this comes in the Kit Create, which only costs $49.
"RePhone is a set of tools and components that allows everyone – including students, teachers, makers, hackers, geeks, artists, developers and engineers – rethink, remix, redesign and remake the phone," says Seeed, the company behind the RePhone, on its Kickstarter page.
Of course, the experimental board is more experimental than anything else and might not be something that you would want to carry around in your pocket, but it does seem to work pretty well. It offers programming libraries such as Arduino IDE, Lua and JavaScript, allowing users to connect their phone to the web.
It comes in three kits—RePhone Core Module GSM + BLE has a system-on-chip (SOC) for wearables and Internet Of Things and a range of communication protocols including GSM, GPRS and Bluetooth (4.0 and 2.1 Dual mode); RePhone Core Module 3G has a microcontroller, standard xadow interface, USB, support for an analog audio interface with a speaker, two microphones and a headset, nano SIM, button, LED, antenna, supports HSPA/WCDMA and GPRS/EDGE, and has voltage of 3.3-4.2V; and the RePhone kit Create includes RePhone Core module, the Audio module and a 1.54-inch touch screen. There are 8 add-on modules for more functionallity.
So far the Kickstarter campaign has raised a whopping $88,503, far more than the $50,000 funding goal. Not only that, but it still has 34 days to go, making it likely that it will break $100,000 before funding is over.
There are a range of funding options for users, with the cheapest being $12 for the core module with GSM and Bluetooth low energy, and the maximum being $10,000, which offers users the chance to produce their own indie phone in Shenzhen with the company, walking away with 100 of their own phones.
Via: TechCrunch
