Building Your Own 4G LTE Base Station

We’ve seen quite a few DIY 2G networks over the years, but the 4G field has been relatively barren. Turns out, there’s an open source suite called srsRAN that lets you use an SDR for se…

FairBerry Brings The PKB Back To Your Smartphone

Missing the feel of physical keys on your phone, but not ready to give up your fancy new touchscreen phone? [Dakkaron] has attached a BlackBerry keyboard to a slightly more recent device. Designed …

Balloon To Fly During Solar Eclipse

The Great American Eclipse was a solar eclipse that passed nearly the entire continental United States back in 2017. While it might sound like a once-in-a-lifetime event to experience a total solar…

2G Or Not 2G, That Is The Question

Since the very early 1990s, we have become used to ubiquitous digital mobile phone coverage for both voice and data. Such has been their success that they have for many users entirely supplanted th…

Even 3D Printers Are Taking Selfies Now

We love watching 3D prints magically grow, through the power of timelapse videos. These are easier to make than ever, due in no small part to a vibrant community that’s continuously refining …

An Open Source Mobile Phone Based On The ESP32

As microcontrollers become ever faster and cheaper, something we’ve been expecting has been an open source smartphone based not upon a high-end chip, but on a cheap commodity one. In the elec…

LaForge Demystifies ESIM

This talk at Chaos Communications Camp 2023 is probably everything you want to know about eSIM technology, in just under an hour. And it’s surprisingly complicated. If you’ve never dug into SIMs be…

Nokia N-Gage QD Becomes Universal Bluetooth Gamepad

The Nokia N-Gage might not have put up much of a fight against Nintendo’s handheld dynasty, but you can’t say it didn’t have some pretty impressive technology for the time. [Beard…

Custom Bluetooth Adapter Brings 1990s Car Phone Back Online

[Jeff Lau]’s Mitsubishi 3000GT comes with all the essential features you’d expect in a fancy sports car from 1993: pop-up headlights, movable spoilers, and a fully-functional telephone …

The Rise And (Eventual) Fall Of The SIM Card

There are few devices that better exemplify the breakneck pace of modern technical advancement than the mobile phone. In the span of just a decade, we went from flip phones and polyphonic ringtones…

Repurposing Old Smartphones: When Reusing Makes More Sense Than Recycling

When looking at the specifications of smartphones that have been released over the past years, it’s remarkable to see how aspects like CPU cores, clockspeeds and GPU performance have improved…

Wooden Smartphone Sleeve Keeps You On Task

Smartphones are amazing tools, but sometimes they can be an equally amazing time suck. In an effort to minimize how much precious time goes down the drain, [Lance Pan and Zeynep Kirmiziyesil] decid…

First Folding IPhone Doesn’t Come From Apple

Folding phones are all the rage these days, with many of the major smartphone manufacturer’s having something in this form factor. Apple has been conspicuously absent in this market segment, …

A Raspberry Pi Phone For The Modern Era

While it might seem like mobile phones are special devices, both in their ease of use and in their ubiquity in the modern culture, they are essentially nothing more than small form-factor computers…

The Open Source Rotary Cell Phone, Two Years Later

We know the pandemic has screwed with a lot of people’s sense of time, but we doubled checked, and it has indeed been more than two years since the Internet first laid eyes upon the incredibl…

Apple’s Satellite Emergency Texts, How Do They Work?

There is always some hype surrounding an Apple product announcement, and while maybe it’s not in the same league as those for the original iPod or iPhone, their iPhone 14 model will include e…

Nokia 5110 Gets Android Stowaway And A Keyboard

Even though Nokia is largely an afterthought in the phone market now, there was a time when their products represented the state-of-the-art in mobile devices. Some of the their handsets even featur…

Observe Airflow Using Smartphone And Background-Oriented Schlieren

Multiple people have recently shared this exciting demonstration (nitter) with us – visualizing airflow using a smartphone, called ‘background-oriented schlieren’. On a hot summer…

Boot Mainline Linux On Apple A7, A8 And A8X Devices

[Konrad Dybcio] tells about his journey booting Linux on A7/8/8X processors, playing around with an old iPhone 5 he’s got in a drawer. It’s been a two-year “revisit every now and …

Automatic Turntable Makes Photogrammetry A Cinch

Photogrammetry is a great way to produce accurate 3D models of real objects. A turntable is often a common tool used in this work as it helps image an object from all angles. [Peter Lin] wanted a w…