Fona

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Overview

I am tired of the distraction represented by my smartphone. I am tired of feeling like it watches me all the time.

I'm building my own phone.

The turning point was a deal on a free additional line from Ting. This means I can keep my current phone operational while I develop the new one without incurring an additional monthly line charge. Talk minutes won't change since I never talk. :-) It won't be a smart phone so we will probably stop using WhatsApp messaging. BT keyboard maybe? Don't want to go back to SMS. We'll see. First it has to function as a phone. It could take a year to get it that far.

Adafruit sells breakout boards called FONA

2G is going away next year so that pretty much leaves the only first one.

These are all accessory boards, meaning you probably want to hook it up to a controller like an Arduino for instance.

Adafruit also sells the Particle Electron 3G board too, in fact I have one of those, but it's NOT an accessory board and I am not excited to learn how to program it right now. Maybe later.

How do I get it hooked up?

Follow this guide; here are my own notes.

More docs here: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-fona-3g-cellular-gps-breakout/downloads

Step 1, power it up and activate the card.

I can connect a UART cable, the phone antenna, and pop in the SIM card, and zingo! Off we go. More or less.

I need to collect together

  • Fona 3G
  • Headers for the Fona, perhaps I dont want to solder them on just yet
  • Ting SIM card
  • Micro USB cable
  • Li-Ion battery
  • Ear buds
  • GSM antenna
  • A breadboard

Optional

  • 8 ohm speaker
  • electret microphone
  • GPS antenna
  • A UART - USB adapter

I did get enough of these parts together on a breadboard to activate my Ting SIM card and confirm the board works.

There is support for a keypad on the chip, unfortunately AdaFruit did not bring them out to the breakout board. Probably you could build a flipphone using this chip if you did your own board.