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Engineer builds his own cell phone with a Raspberry Pi

engineer builds cell phone raspberry pi
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Raspberry Pi — is there anything it can’t do? The tiny computer has helped inventors and hackers create a media streamer, outer space camera, games console and cocktail-mixing robot in its short lifetime, and you can now add cell phone to that impressive list. Linux software engineer David Hunt has put together a working mobile phone using spare parts and a Raspberry Pi, as demonstrated on his blog.

Hunt, based in Ireland, has been tinkering with the miniature platform for a while — he has previously demoed a Pi-powered RAID server and DSLR attachment, among other projects — but his working cell phone is his most impressive effort yet. In total, the components add up to a bottom line price of $158, if you’re thinking about building your own cell phone.

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As you can see from the picture above, the custom-made touchscreen interface is fairly basic, but it does the job. You can only make calls with the PiPhone, so a quick burst of 2048 or a flick through Facebook is out of the question. As well as the Pi and the touchscreen, the device is kitted out with a 2500mAh LiPo battery and a SIM900 GSM/GPRS module.

Watch the video below to see the PiPhone in action. “It’s a bit of a mess, but you wouldn’t actually use it in the real world,” Hunt says, before explaining that heat was the biggest problem he came across. “You can feel it getting a little bit warm. It doesn’t crash or anything, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be good to put it in an enclosure without some sort of heat sink.”

David Nield
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…
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