Cell Phone

It has been over a year since my last post, and you possibly think that I am idle. However, this isn't exactly true. After I got a 128x128 pixel 64k color display for Arduino, which I soldered together, I bought the Arduino as well and then wondered what my next project would be. Meandering through the mall I found a very inexpensive SIM900 GRPS chip, which worked well together with the other components I had. So I started building a cell phone, which currently is still in a preliminary stage, of which there are a few pictures here.

As you can see, the cell phone isn't exactly small (and this is without the microphone, speaker and input device) but it works a little bit (if you read the display correctly it says "Call ready" at the end). It's currently using 8 KB out of 32 KB, so I think I should be able to write at least a few services for it. It can do SMS, calls and even internet with a speed up to 86 kb/s (more than enough to download pictures to fill the display). I'm using an H2O subscription, which is very cheap ($10 for the SIM, and $10/90 days, unless I use a lot of money on calls ($0.05/minute), SMS ($0.10/message) or Internet ($0.10/MB). I'm still not entirely sure about the input mechanism, I'm considering a PS/2 keyboard, but will probably end up with up, down, left, right and submit as an interface.