[QUOTE=DrasarSalman;42155004]I just wish he could give out some information, rather than just the general idea. He hasn't even said what he works as or what kind of experience he has with these kinds of things.[/QUOTE]
He's an Ideas guy.
[QUOTE=Lf751;42156526]This is just another marketing ploy.[/QUOTE]
but theres no company marketing it,just one dude with an idea thats not marketing!
I think this is actually achievable. But it probably wouldn't be cheap.
First problem I thought of was power and routing. For instance, if you can put any module anywhere, and every module needs a positive voltage and a ground, then technically every single receptacle would have to be connected together. This obviously won't work. So to get around this, there needs to be like a co-axial power connector at the center of each grid of 4 receptacles. Co-axial just to make it tidy, so you have your positive and ground connection in one simple connector. They would all just be connected together, and no matter where you plug the battery in, everything else gets power.
Then the next problem is signal routing. There would have to be a custom chip to do this. Every receptacle would need to be connected to the input and output side of a large chip. These chips would determine if the connected pin is an input or output and route it accordingly. This means when the module is plugged in, it needs to broadcast a signal telling the routing chip how many data pins it has and if each one is an output or input.
Then lastly every module needs to be serialized. This means additional parts and complexity and would probably raise the price as well as power consumption for each module.
I think ditching the memory and cpu chips and then treating everything else like usb would be the way to go, that way it would be decently cheap and compact and feasibly come out within the next 5 years
Are there any engineers in this thread? No one's mentioned FPGAs. Set a standardised, unique identification code for each block, and program the FPGA's firmware to automatically reconfigure connections.
Power connections are a little more interesting. Either the device will need two rails running around the phone's perimeter, and the battery will need to be plugged such that it connects with the edge rails, or the battery connectors could be longer than component connectors, and slot into a separate layer below the breadboard.
Since an FPGA can perform basic processing and directly emulate GSM, UMTS and LTE modules without the need for external hardware the breadboard itself could act as a basic phone with a minimum of external hardware.
It's definitely not impossible like some people say, but I can see this being very messy and a huge engineering challenge to make it work. They would need to create a standardised interface for all the devices to communicate with the motherboard and eachother. And that interface would have to be good at everything. It would have to be able to both provide power to and even take power (because different sized batteries) from every let's say 2×2 block of pins, it would need a huge bandwidth for the cpu, memory and even the camera. This is kind of like wanting to build a PC where all the components are plugged together with USB. It's not completely impossible, but the USB standard would need some huge upgrades for this to work well.
[QUOTE=QwertySecond;42175152]Are there any engineers in this thread? No one's mentioned FPGAs. Set a standardised, unique identification code for each block, and program the FPGA's firmware to automatically reconfigure connections.
Power connections are a little more interesting. Either the device will need two rails running around the phone's perimeter, and the battery will need to be plugged such that it connects with the edge rails, or the battery connectors could be longer than component connectors, and slot into a separate layer below the breadboard.
Since an FPGA can perform basic processing and directly emulate GSM, UMTS and LTE modules without the need for external hardware the breadboard itself could act as a basic phone with a minimum of external hardware.[/QUOTE]
There was one in the SH thread:
[QUOTE=aydin690;42161896]EE here. The amount of bandwidth flowing between different components and frequencies involved on a pcb and the sheer number of connections just screams integration. Not to mention the amount of engineering that goes into things like thermal management, antennas, signal integrity, emi compliance, and power management. It may be doable but I don't think its worth doing.
[editline]11th September 2013[/editline]
[quote]Embedded Systems Engineer's Dream[/quote]
LOL, more like any engineer's nightmare.[/QUOTE]
So basically, if this is just a slight bit possible, it would take years to develop and I don't think any engineer or group of engineers would even bother with making it with what given from a fund-raised kickstarter and even less so from just whining twitter people alone. The guy in the video can't possibly make enough money for anyone to bother doing it for him and companies like Apple and Samsung are already making millions on people buying entire new phones every year, so it's a major market standard that would again take even longer to change and any major phone producer would be highly unlikely to agree with changing it.
If anything, the guy has a better chance of getting support for smartphone companies to allow internal customization, such as different processors, gpu's, etc, on a moderately advanced level.
Which would, in any case, make it hard for an average person to build a phone on their own, at which point the company would have to charge the customer more money to upgrade it.
That solution seems like an in-between of the Phonebloks and modern smartphones, seeing as how it's impossible to create a Phoneblok by modern engineering standards, not tot mention phone companies won't support this idea.
I mean, phone companies want money by selling phones, which they make so that their components break within a certain amount of time (1-2 years around), then create new phones to replace the older models. If customers were allowed to pay to customize their phones' specifications, that would be a good halfway point between phonebloks and smartphones, as phone companies still make money, but customers won't have to replace their phone model every year or so.
Umm, not going to happen.
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