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Comment by janjongboom | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, true, but the building blocks are available to port it to any cheap Android 4.x phone. I just don't have them available. I also chose this particular list because all of them ship rooted and have downloadable images available in case someone f*ks up, so I don't brick anyone's device :-)

An open source kernel also helps when you do GPIO support etc.

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Would device donations be of any use to you?

I love the idea behind this project. It would be great to see "out of the box" support on some more accessible devices.

I have been able to use the modified System application on my own firefoxos-based boards. However, for GPIO I have used a background process based on NodeJS (which exposes the ports using a REST-api). Getting GPIO working on some phoneboards would still prove a challenge as mostly they do not have these easily exposed.

No, not super easy, but not impossible either. http://ee.telenor.io/gonzo/hardware/2015/02/10/gpio.html

... of the GPIO on the SoC, you only have some of the exposed buttons a device might have. Far from ideal... also, at the moment FirefoxOS itself does not have a notion of GPIO as a WebAPI. But great to see this, nice article.

Correct, but they're exposed over file descriptors, and I added http://janos.io/api-reference/fs.html to talk to them :-).

This is what I've been looking for. I didn't want to have to create something like this myself, but wanted to be able to reuse older smartphones lying around. I don't know if I want to use JS though.

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