eSIM Studios
You often hear that the phone in your pocket has more processing power than the room-sized computers that NASA used to help send astronauts to the moon. But modern smartphones also have relatively limited lifespans – while some device makers are doing a better job of offering long-term support, it's often cheaper or easier to replace an old phone than it is to fix a cracked display or replace a dying battery.
One Belgium-based company is breathing new life into old smartphone parts though, by ripping the mainboard out of an old phone and adding the ports and other features necessary to use it like a single-board computer. Citronics is kicking things off by offering a development kit made by combining a Fairphone 2 motherboard with a purpose-build carrier board that turns it into a tiny desktop computer. The Citronix DevKit is available for pre-order for 150€ and it's expected to ship this month.
The Fairphone 2 is a smartphone that was released almost a decade ago, so it's not exactly state-of-the-art hardware. The mainboard features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 32-bit 2.26 GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage.
But the kit also has some features you don't often see on single-board computers including a cellular modem with support for 4G LTE Cat 4 networks.
Other features include a 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M series 32-bit co-processor, 578 MHz quad-core GPU, support for WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 4.0, a microSD card reader, and a custom carrier board that adds features you wouldn't normally get on the smartphone mainboard, including:
What you lose are the touchscreen display, camera, and battery. And the dev kit doesn't include wireless antennas – you'll need to bring your own.
Fairphone 2 Fairphone 2 disassembled… … and reassembled with a carrier board to become a Citronics DevKitFairphone (and Qualcomm, and Google) no longer offer up-to-date Android builds for the Fairphone 2, but it's not clear that you'd want to run Android on this smartphone-turned-into-a-mini PC anyway. Instead Citronics preloads Alpine Linux (which is the same lightweight Linux distro that powers postmarketOS).
At this point Citronics is positioning its devkit as "an evaluation kit for professional customers" looking for a platform for research, development, and prototyping. It's not meant for the general public.
But I can't help thinking that there's something to this idea of ripping the mainboards out of discarded phones and using purpose-board carrier boards to upcycle them into other products like mini PCs, media streamers, servers, or connected cameras.
It'd be nice to see a company sell just those carrier boards to customers that already have compatible smartphones, giving them a way to keep using their old electronics for longer. It's not at all clear that this is something Citronics plans to do, but it's nice to dream of a new way to keep old phones out of landfills.
via HackADay
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