David Hunt built himself a working mobile phone using a Raspberry Pi and off-the-shelf components. The main building parts are the $35 Adafruit Touchscreen interface and a $48 SIM900 GSM/GPRS module for making phone calls. In total the phone costs $158 to build.

Hunt is rather modest about it saying "I don’t expect everyone to be rushing out to build this one" but looking at the attention the project has gotten the PiPhone obviously strikes a nerve. Hassled by walled gardens, unannounced mandatory cloud syncing (I'm looking at you Apple) and user data collecting apps disguised as flashlight controllers building your own phone is an act of emancipation.

A detailed description of the project is available on David Hunt's blog. The code is available on GitHub.

Hunt is an embedded Linux Software engineer based in Ireland who also takes amazing otherworldly photopgraphs. And then there's the Pi thing. His blog documents a lot more crazy Pi projects like the Pi-Rex: a bark activated door opening system to give dogs some autonomy.



Thanks to Okkipi instigater @Dosch for the tip.

Image: David Hunt