What is the WiPhone? 

WiPhone is a unique, minimal phone.

It's designed to enable hackers by making it easy to extend and modify the electronics and software. Something typical phones are not good for.

WiPhone is also a VoIP mobile phone. It uses WIFI to make HD voice calls, for free. This means that there is no required service contract - and it's yours for life.

For Hackers: 

WiPhone: Business In The Front, Party In The Back

Yet So Stylish And Sophisticated!

WiPhone: Perfect for both hardware hacking AND trips to the business factory.

 WiPhone Pro with Clear Front Face:

Smartphones Are A Little Too Smart

What's the best platform you can imagine for electronics hacking?

It should probably be adaptable, powerful, and programmable. Small and portable would be nice. Maybe with a durable case? What about a built in user interface with things like an LCD screen and button panel? A battery and built-in charging system? Wireless connectivity?

Hey... we just described a mobile phone!

But why aren't people building more projects based on their smartphones? Well, there are a few issues:

• no electrical connectors to directly connect to the outside world
• no way to easily control the low level hardware, like processor output pins
• opaque development environment and huge IDE
• not designed for easy disassembly, repair, or modification

Enter WiPhone: 

WiPhone solves these problems and gives hackers, makers, and engineers the tool we all wish our phones could be. Nice package, direct access to I/O, an easy to program ESP32 processor. All the basics are already set up: user interface, power management and on/off circuit, working code.

You can get straight to work building your project, not setting up the boring parts like power management again and again. And once you're done it's durable and looks great. No ratsnest of wires or ugly stack of dev boards just to get the basic functionality.  

Modern smartphones are more and more a tool we don't own, but instead one we're only allowed to carry around. One that serves the interests of various tracking networks, corporate boards, and government organizations. You don't own it, it owns you. It tracks you, serves you ads, and sucks away your time with mindless dopamine hits. We want a phone that's back in our control, optimized for our convenience.

Free Calling! No Hacking Required!

WiPhone is different beast from most smartphones these days. WiPhone uses the existing WiFi around you to make HD Voice calls. For free. Buy it once and it's yours.

Works on most broadband WiFi networks (including most home WiFi connections). No service contract required, and you can even upgrade the firmware or expand the hardware to do things it wasn't originally intended for. 

What Is This Magical Free Calling You Speak of? Tell me more...

Free calling starts with a SIP account. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, and it's a standard way to make call over the internet. VoIP is a related term that you may have heard of. There are commercial services that provide SIP/VoIP accounts, and some of them have free accounts. Most consumers use VoIP apps like Skype and Whatsapp, but we can still use the underlying technology directly. After the campaign we'll spend more time testing services to make our software and instructions work as seamlessly as possible.

Step 1: Get a SIP account (many different ways to do this, but we wrote up a simple how-to that might get you started).

Step 2: Log in on your WiPhone using the credentials from your SIP account (user name, password, and server):

Step 3: Make a Call:

That's it!

Note: we're still working through compatibility with various SIP providers since many of them implement the standard in various ways. Once the WiPhones ship we'll update our getting started instructions to use the servers we find to be most reliable.

What people are saying about WiPhone:

“This is a great cross over between what people know (phones) and what people really want to do (hack)." -Nathan Seidle, Sparkfun Founder

“The WiPhone is a really rather neatly put together project.” -Alasdair Allan, Hackster.io

“If you want a phone that respects your right to repair, this is the project to look at.” -Brian Benchoff, Hackaday.com

“So excited by this project I tried to make one myself” -Random Guy On Our YouTube Channel

First Class Expansion Capabilities

WiPhone is expandable through daughter boards. The whole back of the phone is a replaceable panel that accepts a standard 1.6mm thickness PCB, which you can use to add whatever functionality you like.

Daughterboard PCB Design, Keepout Areas

Some Examples

We made a WiPhone into an RC car:

And we also made the coolest way to ever to answer a phone:

The daughterboard headers have power, digital I/O, and all the common embedded busses like SPI, I2C, and UART.

Easy Development 

Develop in Arduino/C++ or Python. We'll also provide basic tutorials covering how to write to the screen, connect to the hardware, save data to memory, etc.  We'll let you give us feedback on what's most important to you.

No-Mess Prototyping 

Build Your Prototype Right On The Back Of The Phone

Daughterboards are what make the WiPhone so unique. Pre-made designs allow you to swap in functionality as you need it, or you can make your own to easily and quickly prototype new ideas or customize your phone to do the things you need.

LoRa 

LoRa is a radio technology that enables sending short packets of data over a long range (generally kilometers). The LoRa daughter board is designed around the HopeRF RFM95W LoRa-enabled radio module. An onboard 915 MHz PCB antenna makes the board handy and easy to carry anywhere. For users who want more range, add an external antenna using the U.fl connector.

Build Status and Prototypes

We've made a lot of progress already. VoIP calling works and we've gone through over 5 generations of prototypes. The current phone prototypes look and feel almost like production units.

WiPhone Prototyping Progression

Mechanical:

• The units we have now are durable and look good. Can be carried around in public without any bomb searches :).
• Still need to do some reliability testing to make sure we have the right material for the front screen cover (needs to be scratch resistant), plating for the frame, etc.
• Need to go through and set manufacturing tolerances for everything
• Choose the final keypad material.

Electrical:

• Most major bugs have been dealt with... the power system works and doesn't use excessive power when it shouldn't, the mic and speaker do what they need to without a lot of noise, and the connection to the daughterboards has been used with a variety of daughterboards.
• Need to do more extensive power testing since this is a common area that devices can have problems with.
• Need to build an automated programmer and tester.

Software:

• We can make and receive calls.
• Some SIP providers implement different methods for session initiation, calling, etc, and we are currently testing various accounts and working through bugs and adding abilities to use more providers.
• Python apps and OTA firmware updates are yet to be implemented.