The unPhone is, as its identify suggests, not a cellphone. It is simply as nicely it isn’t, actually: regardless of its phone-like form and luxury within the hand, it has neither a speaker nor a microphone with which you could possibly make calls.
What it does have is an open supply design and firmware, operating on an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller hidden behind its full-color touchscreen — and a low-power long-range LoRa radio module that may attain as much as 60 miles or extra, even whereas counting on a easy hidden copper coil as its antenna.
The unPhone is just not a cellphone, that a lot is obvious. It is each greater than a cellphone, and fewer than — and serves as the guts of a hands-on schooling within the Web of Issues (IoT), developed by Hamish Cunningham on the College of Sheffield within the UK. And now, it is in the stores off-the-shelf — however is it price it?
The {hardware}
- Microcontroller: Espressif ESP32-S3-WROOM-1, 8MB PSRAM
- Storage: 8MB flash, microSD Card (16GB included)
- Show: 3.5″ 320×480 Coloration LCD Resistive Touchscreen (gloss)
- Radios: ESP32-S3 (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth), HopeRF RFM950 (LoRa 868MHz, 915MHz tunable)
- Sensors: Accelerometer, Magnetometer
- IO: 3× Push-Button Switches, RGB LED, IR LED, Vibration Motor
- Enlargement: 4× GPIO, I2C, SPI, Enlargement Header to Enlargement Board (6× ADC, UART, 1× GPIO, 2× FeatherWing)
- Software program: ESP-IDF, Arduino IDE, Visible Studio with PlatformIO Core, CircuitPython
- License: {Hardware} Artistic Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Worldwide, Software program GNU Affero Basic Public License 3
It is not a cellphone, however that must be clear from the identify: meet the unPhone. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
The unPhone appears to be like and feels, unsurprisingly, like a cellphone — albeit one from a decade or so in the past. The largely-plastic chassis, with a entrance panel produced from PCB, is held in place by 4 bolts; take these away and the one board that makes the machine work is revealed.
The model of the unPhone on evaluate is, technically, the unPhone9 — the quantity being incremented for every prototype main as much as it. The mission started on a breadboard, later generally known as the unPhone0, and was developed by Cunningham and colleagues on the College of Sheffield with BitFIXit’s Gareth Coleman and Pimoroni’s Gee Bartlett and Paul Beech — who’ve taken on the duty of manufacturing and promoting the retail variant of the machine.
The machine is powered by an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller, with a HopeRF RFM950 LoRa transceiver for good measure. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
The entrance, like a cellphone, is dominated by a 3.5″ 320×480 coloration LCD panel with a resistive contact layer and a particularly shiny end that may make the gadget troublesome to make use of in brilliant daylight. To the correct of the display, when held in panorama orientation, is a trio of tactile push-button switches marked with sq., circle, and triangle symbols, simply above a aspect panel that gives a software-driven on-off swap, reset button, RGB and infrared LEDs, and a USB Kind-C connector carrying each knowledge and energy. There’s additionally a vibration motor hidden inside, although no speaker or microphone.
That energy goes to a 1,200mAh lithium battery held in a fairly tight-fitting part of the plastic rear case — a downgrade from the 1,400mAh talked about within the documentation supplied on the unPhone website, however nonetheless good for round six hours of energetic use because of the choice to make use of a low-power Espressif ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 module moderately than a high-performance application-class system-on-chip such as you’d discover in a cellphone. That is situated on the board subsequent to a HopeRF RFM950 LoRa transceiver — which supplies the machine long-range low-power radio connectivity on prime of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Vitality (BLE) obtainable from the ESP32-S3.
The interior battery fees over USB Kind-C, which may also be used to program the ESP32. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
Past the 8MB of flash within the microcontroller module, pre-programmed with a easy demo firmware that assessments the show and exhibits off a couple of primary features, there is a microSD Card slot for storage — with simply sufficient of a spot within the cut-out to make it attainable to by accident slide the cardboard in above the precise metallic slot and lose it throughout the case, so watch out when you’re swapping playing cards round.
With its thick plastic case, comparatively small display, and {hardware} buttons, you’d not consider the unPhone as a cellphone for lengthy — but it surely’s solidly constructed, feels pleasingly weighty and sturdy within the hand, and is well taken aside and reassembled must you, for example, must retrieve a misplaced microSD Card.
An academic platform
The unPhone is greater than the sum of its components: the mission happened as a want to ship a platform for instructing the core ideas behind the Web of Issues. Because of this, Cunningham and colleagues have been working heading in the right direction supplies to go lengthy with it — constructing the unPhone right into a curriculum that features a freely-accessible “IoT e book” operating to round 300 pages.
Not each web page of the e book is concerning the unPhone. Certainly, the IoT e book — correctly titled “Mi Casa su Botnet?”, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the oft-overlooked safety of Web of Issues gadgets — meanders by way of a variety of matters from the Digital PDP-10 minicomputer and blinking an LED with a breadboarded ESP32 to machine studying, real-time working programs, and a separate academic platform for automated aquaponics dubbed WaterElf.
The open supply textbook accompanying the mission is over 300 pages lengthy, although solely a small part is devoted to the unPhone. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
For these with prior expertise, it is attainable to skip the background and soar straight to the meat in Chapter 11, unPhone Your self, which introduces the {hardware} and demonstrates the right way to program it in C++ utilizing the Arduino IDE with the ESP32 core and the unPhone library. Appendices provide a take a look at different approaches, together with utilizing Espressif’s ESP-IDF on the command line, both natively or by way of a Docker container, utilizing PlatformIO by way of Microsoft Visible Studio Code with the ESP-IDF or Arduino plugins, and programming the unPhone with CircuitPython — a port that, on the time of writing, was in a really early state.
These coming on the matter from a clean slate will profit from starting in the beginning, the place they are going to be walked by way of every part from organising a GitLab account — although you may must skip the part on ensuring to make use of your College of Sheffield e-mail account except you are really a pupil there — to getting your construct setting arrange. You may additionally want further {hardware}: college students attending the course in-person obtain a {hardware} equipment that features a Feather-format ESP32-S3 board, solderless breadboard, and numerous elements, which aren’t included as a part of the unPhone.
A recently-launched discussion board permits for peer-to-peer assist — superb for these not attending the College of Sheffield. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
The courseware produced for the unPhone is just not solely freely obtainable, however open: Cunningham publishes the e book underneath the Artistic Commons Attribution Share-Alike Non-Business 4 license. This extends to all different elements of the mission, too: a bit within the e book walks by way of the unPhone’s schematics, although primarily based on the sooner unPhone6v2, whereas all supply code is printed to GitLab underneath the GNU Affero Basic Public License 3.
Room for experimentation
The courseware will not get you far, although. Whereas it covers a course round 100 hours in size, solely a small part focuses on the unPhone itself — and it rapidly skims over programming the machine, demonstrating the right way to use the library to initialize the {hardware}, use the RGB and IR LEDs, verify the standing of the facility swap, entry the touchscreen show, learn the accelerometer, deal with energy administration, and the right way to ship a brief message to The Issues Community over the LoRa radio.
Past this, the reader is left instance code — together with a slick person interface demo written in LVGL, which sadly makes no precise use of the unPhone’s options past the touchscreen — to determine the right way to use the machine. This, greater than anything, highlights a cut up viewers for the gadget: these utilizing it as a part of a college course, the place the IoT e book is backed by in-person tutoring, and people who have picked it up at retail for just a little self-directed experimentation.
A bundled enlargement board gives house for 2 FeatherWing add-ons and a helpful prototyping space. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
It is this latter viewers that’s probably to really feel let down by the unPhone, as they battle by way of the gulf between a four-line code fragment demonstrating the blind transmission of a single message to The Issues Community and really utilizing the radio for helpful two-way communication. For rookies, then, the unPhone is maybe not the very best machine; however for these with both the prior expertise or tenacity to keep it up, there’s so much to love.
The colour touchscreen means the unPhone will be tailored right into a controller for a spread of tasks, in a slick self-contained handheld kind issue. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can be utilized for native communication, whereas the LoRa radio is there must you want one thing longer vary — examined by Cunningham himself at a spread of 60 miles.
The enlargement board connects to the unPhone by way of a cut-out within the case, through flat versatile circuit (FFC) cable. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
Maybe the very best function, although, is that nothing is proprietary. The unPhone is made up of off-the-shelf elements cleverly linked, and whereas the unPhone library is accessible it isn’t the one means to make use of the machine: when you’d moderately simply pull within the base libraries for the components you need to use and ignore the remainder, you are welcome to take action.
Must you want greater than the bottom {hardware}, there’s room for enlargement too. The board has unpopulated 0.1″ general-purpose enter/output pin headers to 1 aspect, which will be soldered and the wires uncovered to the skin world by way of a break-out part of the case. On the different aspect, subsequent to the battery connector, is a zero-insertion power (ZIF) socket for a flat versatile cable (FFC) — designed to be used with a bundled breakout board good for internet hosting two FeatherWing-format breakout boards and your selection of elements on a small prototyping space.
Conclusion
The unPhone is just not a cellphone, however that is clear from the identify. It’s, nonetheless, an amazing platform for experimenting with phone-like interfaces to the Web of Issues — as long as you do not want audio — and may flip its hand to something an ESP32-S3 can do. In the event you needed to make use of it as a handheld Bluetooth controller for a robotic, you’ll be able to. If you would like to run a retro-computing emulator on there, nothing will cease you. If you wish to comply with Cunningham’s course, whether or not you are enrolled on the College of Sheffield or not, you are able to do that too.
It is not with out its draw back, although. The plastic resistive layer over the display is shiny and simply scratched in comparison with a glass-covered capacitive display, making the unPhone onerous to make use of outdoor — a disgrace, given its built-in battery. A much bigger subject for these outdoors Europe is the radio: whereas it may be flipped in firmware between 868MHz and 915MHz modes, the coil antenna is tuned particularly for 868MHz — making it much less well-suited to North American deployments.
The unPhone is a feature-packed gadget, even when it lacks audio capabilities — however that shiny display is an issue in brilliant lighting. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
Regardless of this, there’s so much to love concerning the unPhone. There isn’t any razzle-dazzle breakthrough {hardware} in there, and every part it does has been carried out earlier than — however having all of it current in a single compact handheld package deal is a deal with. The bundled enlargement board gives room for development, too, and Coleman is at present engaged on porting the Meshtastic firmware to the unPhone for off-grid LoRa-based mesh networking.
Extra info on the unPhone is accessible on the official web site, whereas the courseware is accessible on a devoted sub-site. The business model of the unPhone is accessible to order through Pimoroni at $147.64 — although concentrate on the potential points surrounding the LoRa radio module, talked about above, when you’re planning to order it from a rustic outdoors Europe.
