SUDDENLY, my phone rings. It chirps out a tinny version of what sounds like the Christmas carol Angels We Have Heard on High. I am giddy with amazement.
On the fifth floor of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, David Mellis has just plugged in the mobile phone I spent all afternoon soldering together. That鈥檚 right: I just built a cellphone. By hand.
Mellis is a graduate student in the High-Low Tech lab, a group of engineering evangelists trying to bring technology know-how to people who perhaps thought it was out of reach. In 2005, he helped found , a company that makes easy-to-program microprocessors and sells them on simple circuit boards. The idea is to help people make electronic products without needing a degree in computer science.
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They鈥檙e popular among hobbyists, hackers and the sort of people who end up working at the Media Lab but they鈥檙e hardly mainstream. Mellis wondered if he could take the idea further.
鈥淭he tricky thing is getting it beyond the people who are already doing electronics stuff,鈥� he says. So he decided to see if he could design consumer electronics that you can make yourself and actually use. He started with radios, speakers and computer mice before making the leap to the ultimate consumer device: .
Mellis shows me how to melt the soft metal solder onto the circuit board he designed and how to use the metal to attach resistors and capacitors about the size of a few grains of salt. I鈥檓 nervous at first 鈥� I鈥檝e never soldered anything in my life. That makes me a good test subject, Mellis says.
鈥淚鈥檓 nervous at first 鈥� I鈥檝e never soldered anything in my life. That makes me a good test subject鈥�
鈥淚鈥檓 interested in trying to open up the process to people who haven鈥檛 really done this stuff before,鈥� he says.
Soldering felt a little like doing a colour-by-numbers painting 鈥� I was filling in spaces on the circuit board, but my understanding of how the parts fit together was pretty sparse. And a lot of components were still out of my control. I used Mellis鈥檚 software, for instance, which gives the phone capabilities similar to that of a 10-year-old Nokia phone: it can make and receive calls and texts, store up to 255 phone numbers, and has a clock.
The whole thing costs about $100 in parts, excluding the SIM card. Nearly all of the components came from online electronics or hobbyist shops, he says, and the instructions and source code are available on . However, the GSM module, which connects the phone to the cellular network and translates audio signals to the speaker and microphone, came from a Chinese e-commerce website.
The back of the phone has spaces for working parts: the GSM module; a microcontroller, which brings signals from the GSM module to the buttons and screen; a matchstick-sized antenna; and a SIM card holder.
I bought the SIM card, with its month-to-month data-free plan, from the T Mobile store 鈥� connecting to the network is one thing I can鈥檛 do myself.
When it was time to laser cut the case, I used Mellis鈥檚 designs. That means my phone is identical to his prototype, which he has been using as his mobile phone for the past three months. The end result is a little coarse and chunky, but ends up about the size and thickness of my Android smartphone. I鈥檓 already thinking of ways to make it my own. I could knit it a case. I could paint it. I could design a new cover and have it laser cut myself.
I鈥檓 also thinking of ways I could use it. One of Mellis鈥檚 labmates wants to make a phone with a single button for his grandma to call him. Another says that if she ever has kids, she鈥檒l give them a phone that only calls her.
I鈥檓 not ready to throw away my smartphone just yet. But I might start taking this phone on holiday, so I can escape Facebook and email but still make calls. And because I built it, I鈥檓 starting to grow quite attached to it.
