Paxo: A DIY Phone | Hacker News Reader

Paxo: A DIY Phone

paxo.fr

138 pointsconaclos36 comments

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…

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.

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.

I think that's correct.

Maybe even just a different title, indicating it's a youth project, would have set more accurate expectations.

There are a LOT of half baked linux phone projects. And many people here, I'm sure, have bought and tried to use a few of those. It's generally not a fun experience. Even if a person is trying to contribute to the project, if you work on something hard for half a year, then have the whole thing disappear into the void. I would call that "not fun".

So, as a high school kids project, it's an awesome acheivement. Just having a high school student be so aware of the impacts of technology freedom is awesome.

But as a "hey, here's your new linux phone", this one is not ready for prime time.

Really just a matter of how the project is presented...

Where did you get that this is "linux phone" project? Because if you spend enough time to read about it, you'll find that it's esp32 based running a RTOS and a custom app suite.

Really matters to read what you comment on...

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.

https://github.com/paxo-phone/paxo-electronic has something, no cool diagrams tho.

They are working on a new version that will include 4G.

Web site needs more pictures of phone and less pictures of wind turbines.

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.

Reminds me of happy memories of traveling ca.2001 with an ebook on my visor edge

HN’s parser stripped away the final dot in the link. Working direct link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring,_Inc%2e

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.

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

The project is still in early stages. More and more people are getting involved, including people with some expertise.

Doesn’t really help that all issues and docs seem to be in French. Typical tho haha

Apprendre le Français?

I'm fine with that so long as either they don't care about us operations or someone (only need one or two) translates.

I suppose your point is that it is a strange topic to do in anything but Chinese?

> compared to previous similar projects

Such as?

SIM800 is 2G so already deprecated

A rather unfortunate choice of name!

https://www.paxo.co.uk/

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.

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.

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.

While you're not wrong, the evidence you laid out proves that such an endeavor is not so simple or easy.

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.

Be the change you wish to see.

> 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.

> The word just is doing a lot of work here.

I find it always does, especially when people are talking about software.

A lot of these kinds of problems go away with vertical integration and limited scope. E.g. if you only want to make phone calls and send SMS (or the internet application of your choice) so you can call it a phone, it's not terrible. You can write that. When you want to run a massive black box like Firefox on top of another massive black box like a proprietary GPU, it is terrible.

> E.g. if you only want to make phone calls and send SMS

What Linux device works with a modern baseband OS out-of-the-box with, say, Verizon or AT&T?

I think it's just as terrible as Firefox/Mesa/Proprietary GPU-- e.g., jumping on forums, pentesting magic messages to the Baseband OS, etc.

None, but the point is that trying to make a dumbphone, using Linux as an ingredient, allows each part of the product to be very specific about the other parts, whereas trying to add general phone support to Linux (say, if you plug in a USB modem) will require either a lowest common denominator or an inconsistent experience, and will have abstraction layers in the middle making the software much harder to develop. Consider that the SMS app for My Linux Dumbphone can open /dev/ttyUSB5 and send AT commands, and the experience as a whole is tested and edited by one person until it works well, while the one for KDE has to use some KDE API which either adapts to KDE Connect (which has to follow an already-designed protocol) or to a Linux kernel API which is implemented by a lowest-effort driver.

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/

Wow, that looks really cool actually. Still a lot of work to turn it into a usable phone but what an amazing foundation.

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.

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