this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Do It Yourself
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Make it, Fix it, Renovate it, Rehabilitate it - as long as you’ve done some part of it yourself, share!
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Assuming that this is a tinkerer/hobby project and you know your odds of getting a daily-driver phone out of it aren't good:
You can get various Pi add-ons and USB-addressable cards that supposedly have texting and/or voice call capability. Look up a company called Sixfab. How well they work in practice, I don't know. Be prepared to immerse yourself in a large manual of AT commands and cell phone protocol stuff.
So things seem to be pointing at a pi for now? Yes this is meant as a hobby project but trying to daily drive it as a phone that can make calls(as it is the only feature of a phone that is really mandatory to me) is also amonv my plans
If you're really against Pis, you could get one of the USB-controlled modules and try hooking it up to something like a LattePanda, but that's going to be more expensive.
You could also theoretically get a cell modem chip from a company like Quectel and design the supporting add-on board yourself for any SBC of your choice, but I suspect that's further down the rabbit hole than you want to go.
So, yeah, the Pi is probably the smartest choice if you really want to do your own hardware build instead of just buying a PinePhone.
I will try a pi alternative first(orange pi etc.)