RePhone kit: an open source modular phone

By Giulio Minotti, Phonebloks

A company called Seeed has recently on Kickstarter launched an interesting modular phone.

RePhone will let you create your own phone in minutes with several modules, an accessible software and a customizable phone case.

This open source modular phone kit is also a set of tools and components that allows everyone to add cellular communication to different objects. For example to have a conversation/link with your pets, toys, motorcycle, robots or drones through RePhone’s GSM and 3G functions.

In particular, Seeed has developed a RePhone Core Module and a RePhone kit Create.

RePhone GSM + BLE module is a little SOC with GSM/GPRS and Bluetooth connection with a 2G nano SIM card.

RePhone Kit Create includes a RePhone Core Module GSM + BLE, an audio module, a 1.54’’ touchscreen, a 520 mAh battery and two precut Kraft Paper to assemble a phone case. This DIY platform lets you create your personal case using a lot of materials, for example wood, plastic, leather, etc.

The company has also developed other modules with NFC, GPS, 3G connection, a camera and basic sensors (3-Axis Accelerometer, a Temperature Sensor and a Light Sensor ).

RePhone is compatible with the Arduino (IDE) platform, with the Pebble smartwatch and with IFTTT (If This, Then That) technology.

The dev team has created rich libraries hooking into Lua and Javascript, with detailed example to help entry-level programmers.They also provide an SDK, based on Eclipse IDE, for C/C++ developers to work with high level applications. There are also simply software to download into the RePhone to make it work.

The Rephone Core will be sold for 12/19 dollars and the entire kit for 39/59 dollars, with first deliveries scheduled for this month.

