Nifty ‘do it yourself’ kits are cropping up all over the place these days – we’ve seen Mike Giles’ Bluetooth speakers and SuperMechanical's Cloudshield, but now a graduate student of the High-Low Tech Lab at MIT, David Mellis, has created a kit to allow you to build an entire mobile phone by hand.
As the creator of Arduino, Mellis is pretty well versed in DIY technology, and has created software that likens the phone to a 10-year-old Nokia – it can make and receive calls and text messages, store over 200 numbers, and tells the time. The whole kit costs about $100 in parts, with the instructions and sourcecodes on Mellis’ website, but isn’t for the faint hearted – you’ll need to melt a soft metal solder onto the circuit board, and attach various resistors and capacitors. What’s most interesting about the whole project though, is Mellis’ approach to process – trying to encourage more people to get involved in buildable technology, and opening it up to an audience that spans wider than hackers, technophiles and the inhabitants of the MIT Labs.
Whilst you may not want to be throwing away your iPhone just yet, we’d imagine taking a call on a phone you’ve made yourself would be a fairly gratifying and novel experience.