SUDDENLY, my phone rings. It chirps out a tinny version of what sounds like the Christmas carol Angels We Have Heard on High. I am giddy with amazement.
On the fifth floor of the MIT Media
Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, David Mellis has just plugged in the
mobile phone I spent all afternoon soldering together. That's right: I
just built a cellphone. By hand.
Mellis is a graduate student in the
High-Low Tech lab, a group of engineering evangelists trying to bring
technology know-how to people who perhaps thought it was out of reach.
In 2005, he helped found Arduino,
a company that makes easy-to-program microprocessors and sells them on
simple circuit boards. The idea is to help people make electronic
products without needing a degree in computer science.
They're popular among hobbyists,
hackers and the sort of people who end up working at the Media Lab but
they're hardly mainstream. Mellis wondered if he could take the idea
further.
"The tricky thing is getting it beyond
the people who are already doing electronics stuff," he says. So he
decided to see if he could design consumer electronics that you can make
yourself and actually use. He started with radios, speakers and
computer mice before making the leap to the ultimate consumer device: the cellphone.
Mellis shows me how to melt the soft
metal solder onto the circuit board he designed and how to use the metal
to attach resistors and capacitors about the size of a few grains of
salt. I'm nervous at first – I've never soldered anything in my life.
That makes me a good test subject, Mellis says.
"I'm interested in trying to open up the process to people who haven't really done this stuff before," he says.
Soldering felt a little like doing a
colour-by-numbers painting – I was filling in spaces on the circuit
board, but my understanding of how the parts fit together was pretty
sparse. And a lot of components were still out of my control. I used
Mellis's software, for instance, which gives the phone capabilities
similar to that of a 10-year-old Nokia phone: it can make and receive
calls and texts, store up to 255 phone numbers, and has a clock.
The whole thing costs about $100 in
parts, excluding the SIM card. Nearly all of the components came from
online electronics or hobbyist shops, he says, and the instructions and
source code are available on his website.
However, the GSM module, which connects the phone to the cellular
network and translates audio signals to the speaker and microphone, came
from a Chinese e-commerce website.
The back of the phone has spaces for
working parts: the GSM module; a microcontroller, which brings signals
from the GSM module to the buttons and screen; a matchstick-sized
antenna; and a SIM card holder.
I bought the SIM card, with its
month-to-month data-free plan, from the T Mobile store – connecting to
the network is one thing I can't do myself.
When it was time to laser cut the
case, I used Mellis's designs. That means my phone is identical to his
prototype, which he has been using as his mobile phone for the past
three months. The end result is a little coarse and chunky, but ends up
about the size and thickness of my Android smartphone. I'm already
thinking of ways to make it my own. I could knit it a case. I could
paint it. I could design a new cover and have it laser cut myself.
I'm also thinking of ways I could use
it. One of Mellis's labmates wants to make a phone with a single button
for his grandma to call him. Another says that if she ever has kids,
she'll give them a phone that only calls her.
I'm not ready to throw away my
smartphone just yet. But I might start taking this phone on holiday, so I
can escape Facebook and email but still make calls. And because I built
it, I'm starting to grow quite attached to it.
source : http://www.newscientist.com
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