[HN Gopher] Paxo: A DIY Phone
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Paxo: A DIY Phone
Author : conaclos
Score : 117 points
Date : 2025-01-26 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paxo.fr)
(TXT) w3m dump (paxo.fr)
| yaky wrote:
| I tried to find some technical details, but there is nothing on
| the tutorials page. The press page links to a few articles in
| French, but all I found was that there is that there is no 4G,
| and "Circuit artisinal fonctionnel" on a diagram.
|
| It would be great to know how it compares with other DIY phone
| projects like ZeroPhone.
| morjom wrote:
| https://github.com/paxo-phone/paxo-electronic has something, no
| cool diagrams tho.
| conaclos wrote:
| They are working on a new version that will include 4G.
| Animats wrote:
| Web site needs more pictures of phone and less pictures of wind
| turbines.
| antongribok wrote:
| The way it looks reminds me of the Handspring Visor[1] for some
| reason (with less buttons).
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring,_Inc.
| YuccaGloriosa wrote:
| Reminds me of happy memories of traveling ca.2001 with an ebook
| on my visor edge
| layer8 wrote:
| HN's parser stripped away the final dot in the link. Working
| direct link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring,_Inc%2e
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| I clicked "back" after looking at the page to point this out!
| If there were a visor with a modern GSM/LTE radio, the ability
| to let me tether a tablet when necessary, and enough horsepower
| to do email and SMS using graffiti input, I think I'd use it as
| a daily driver. The Visor was really great.
| rzr wrote:
| With all respect to the younger generation, this is project is
| oversold compared to previous similar projects.
|
| BTW, which OSHW project is advanced enough to deserve more
| contributions ?
|
| Back to paxo one, According to
|
| https://github.com/paxo-phone/paxo-electronic
|
| It is integration of SIM800L modem with ESP32
|
| Software side, the main app (aka OS):
|
| https://github.com/paxo-phone/PaxOS-9
| conaclos wrote:
| The project is still in early stages. More and more people are
| getting involved, including people with some expertise.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Doesn't really help that all issues and docs seem to be in
| French. Typical tho haha
| rUsHeYaFuBu wrote:
| Apprendre le Francais?
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm fine with that so long as either they don't care about
| us operations or someone (only need one or two) translates.
| snailmailstare wrote:
| I suppose your point is that it is a strange topic to do in
| anything but Chinese?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > compared to previous similar projects
|
| Such as?
| szundi wrote:
| SIM800 is 2G so already deprecated
| GJim wrote:
| A rather unfortunate choice of name!
|
| https://www.paxo.co.uk/
| jonesjohnson wrote:
| Oh man. Again one of those projects where someone glues together
| an Arduino (ESP, Raspberry,...), a modem module and a battery.
| I'm not sure where this is "educational" (except for the
| creators, of course).
|
| I've been using hacky phones all my life (N900, N9, Sailfish,
| Ubuntu Touch, Pinephone, Librem5) and I really really really just
| want people to finally concentrate their efforts and build a
| (non-android) open-source phone (HW + ecosystem) that's actually
| _usable_.
|
| Sorry for this non-constructive post, but this is a topic that
| bothers me quite a lot.
| rambambram wrote:
| With all your experience and opinions, you seem like the best
| guy for the job!
|
| Congrats, from now on you're in charge of and responsible for
| making a non-android open-source phone (plus eco-system!)
| that's actually usable.
| catapart wrote:
| I think your criteria for "best guy for the job" is pretty
| lax.
|
| Personally, I think the main criteria for that position is
| capital, which OP's comment doesn't even broach.
| slyfox125 wrote:
| While you're not wrong, the evidence you laid out proves that
| such an endeavor is not so simple or easy.
| hedora wrote:
| My experience with open source linux phones is that they can
| never make basic decisions like which package manager or ui
| framework to target, so you end up with five completely
| distinct base operating systems. Some can make calls, some
| can receive sms and some can suspend resume. None can do all
| three. If they'd picked one standard approach they could have
| all those things with 10% the effort I've seen go into those
| ecosystems.
|
| I don't think there's anything particularly hard about
| producing an open source linux phone with modern hardware and
| a supported base operating system that is competitive with a
| typical dumb phone.
|
| However, none of the companies that have tried to make an
| open source phone are product focused enough to build such a
| thing.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Be the change you wish to see.
| jancsika wrote:
| > I really really really just want
|
| The word _just_ is doing a lot of work here.
|
| E.g., you want graphics acceleration.
|
| That means you want work done in Mesa so that the GPU in
| question is better supported than it currently is.
|
| But you _also_ want Firefox 's Webrender changed to allow using
| the GPU in question under Linux, by default. Otherwise the
| browsing experience is laggy as hell for everything other than
| HN. That means lots of testing in Firefox, and somehow
| convincing them not to blacklist your GPU under Linux. (Which
| I'm guessing takes time since changes in Mesa don't hit every
| major distro all at once.)
|
| And you _also_ need video acceleration to work out of the box.
| Otherwise you 're going to be trying various flag combos just
| to get your phone from getting hot while watching a video. And
| then your browsing experience probably gets laggy again.
|
| And then you're going to need to rinse and repeat that entire
| process to get the baseband to work with nearly any carrier, at
| least in the U.S. They probably aren't going to support using
| _that_ baseband on something that isn 't an android phone.
| You'll need some reliable way around that. Is this an open
| research question? I don't know.
|
| Once you have those done, try to figure out why playing music
| to a bluetooth speaker over this device sometimes changes the
| pitch of the audio! Oops, another unexpected rabbit hole.
|
| I declare by fiat all of the above problems have been solved.
|
| Oh no, I forgot about battery life.
|
| Now I've got a summer project to figure out why suspend
| sometimes-- but not always-- freezes my phone.
|
| After that I need to figure out the signal path between
| baseband and Linux to figure out why getting a call sometimes--
| but not always-- wakes the phone so it rings reliably.
|
| These are all hard things. The idea that motivated rando open
| source devs can roll up their sleeves and solve phone
| _usability_ is laughable.
| dbalatero wrote:
| > The word just is doing a lot of work here.
|
| I find it always does, especially when people are talking
| about software.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| How does Precursor suit you? It's an open core CPU implemented
| on fpga, no modem included tho (feature not a bug etc), not
| android but from the ground up rust os "xous"
|
| https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
|
| https://xous.dev/
| ruthmarx wrote:
| Wow, that looks really cool actually. Still a lot of work to
| turn it into a usable phone but what an amazing foundation.
| 1n4007 wrote:
| Problem with a non-android thing is that you lose the software
| platform it gives, as well as the ecosystem of apps. To do a
| new thing looks time consuming - the hardware and firmware has
| to be solid, the UI can't just be a desktop Linux in fancy
| dress, and then you need to write apps for stuff.
|
| I sometimes think through doing a garmin-type thing with an
| e-ink display and the features I want - it works out to need
| way too much time: well-integrated hardware, decent low-power
| firmware, then the interface and custom map software is just a
| bit much for a spare-time thing for me (a pick one or two sort
| of deal). Android solves at least the ui and app problem in
| that case.
| Baguette5242 wrote:
| I read a lot of negative/pesimistic comments, but just to put
| things in perspective, this phone was developped by a middle/high
| school guy when he was 13~16 years old... come on guys...
| conaclos wrote:
| Maybe I was wrong to share the project at its early stage. I
| hope the Paxo's team doesn't get discouraged by all these
| negative comments. Personally, I was really impressed with the
| project and wanted to share it here.
| PostOnce wrote:
| People will complain about anything and everything, but those
| aren't the people that matter to a project like this. The
| people that matter to a project like this are the people who
| find it interesting. Linux was a hobby project once.
|
| Some of these comments are like saying of the PS5 "Oh great,
| another `game console` that's just a PC that boots to a
| launcher."
|
| Whatever, close the tab and keep working on it. Building
| stuff is more fun than listening to internet complainers.
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