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Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

puri.sm

41–50 of 53 posts

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#41

(Not a criticism of purism but of how little is required to say "Open Hardware" in general). I have to say how disappointing it is what counts as open hardware. A simple schematic and some xrays? Why not the Kicad(I'm pretty sure that's what they said they used to make it) files, or maybe an openboardview [1] .brd file that would actually help for device repair and hacking on the phone at a hardware level. As a compa…

>I'm pretty sure that's what they said they used to make it That was said about the devkit. Gerber files are supposed to be released in a few years, after recouping development costs.

I sure hope this is true, and it would be a show of good faith to give it to anyone who asks that also signs an NDA or something until the development costs are recouped so people can at least repair them easily.

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#42
post #34

Why has it become so acceptable to launch half-baked products that don't actually work? Twenty years ago, you launched a product and it had to work right out of the box. What's gone wrong here?

It's a crowdfunded project where some of the backers opted in to receive a device from an early batch. What's so unacceptable about that?

And they've been pretty clear that this batch is expected to have issues resolvable in software. I'm sure the audio issue for calls will be fixed in the next few weeks, along with some improvements to battery life and whatnot.

If you don't want a pre-production product, don't opt in for it and wait for Evergreen.

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#43
post #33

Pretty interesting, I hope they make something similar for the laptops. I use an x200 with Libreboot to avoid the proprietary software in new Intel chips and the bios. It's still fast since I use Arch with dwm, but at some point in the future I would like to switch.

> x200 with Libreboot How safe are those now that the Intel vulnerabilities are known? I doubt hardware that old is getting microcode updates.

You can disable hyperthreading to mitigate a lot of Intel vulnerabilities. Qubes, which is a popular OS choice within the coreboot crowd, does this by default.

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good for privacy, but can this way of not wiring the microphone directly would also be helpful to do recordings and to send/receive faxes, or does that not work?

Normal phones can record phone calls, right? I assume that this wouldn't make anything possible that isn't already possible. But, again, I really don't know what I'm talking about here, this is just my understanding from what I've read.

Before I bought a Xiaomi it was impossible to record any call (Samsung, HTC) and it seems it was by design. The only way was installing an app that somehow routed the recording through their servers (no, thanks) otherwise you could only record outgoing (or was it incoming?) sound.

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#45
post #34

Why has it become so acceptable to launch half-baked products that don't actually work? Twenty years ago, you launched a product and it had to work right out of the box. What's gone wrong here?

Some of the customers for this phone are developers who want to contribute to its development. And some customers are so interested in it that they would prefer to receive the half-baked version instead of waiting.

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#46
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the microphone (& speakers?) isn't wired directly to the modem, but needs the CPU to replay the audio to the modem so that the modem (aka, baseband) doesn't have access to the microphone audio except when it actually needs it. So, I would think that the headphone mic wouldn't work either.

This is good for privacy, but can this way of not wiring the microphone directly would also be helpful to do recordings and to send/receive faxes, or does that not work?

My understanding is that, in general, it's not possible to send a fax via cell phone audio because the digital compression applied does not pass enough information to sustain a fax modem connection. It may be possible with a higher-bandwidth thing like voice-over-LTE, though? (of course I'd love to be wrong and learn that this is easy :-)

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good for privacy, but can this way of not wiring the microphone directly would also be helpful to do recordings and to send/receive faxes, or does that not work?

My understanding is that, in general, it's not possible to send a fax via cell phone audio because the digital compression applied does not pass enough information to sustain a fax modem connection. It may be possible with a higher-bandwidth thing like voice-over-LTE, though? (of course I'd love to be wrong and learn that this is easy :-)

CSD data calls are perfectly possible in GSM - your carrier can disallow them though. However, you usually feed and receive data to/from the modem in a different way than via its audio interface ;) Other than that, you're right. It's possible to come up with a way to pass data through GSM codec, but it definitely won't be a regular FAX connection then.

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#48
post #34

Why has it become so acceptable to launch half-baked products that don't actually work? Twenty years ago, you launched a product and it had to work right out of the box. What's gone wrong here?

Ever heard of Apple?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_1_Advertisement_Oct...

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#49
post #32

(Not a criticism of purism but of how little is required to say "Open Hardware" in general). I have to say how disappointing it is what counts as open hardware. A simple schematic and some xrays? Why not the Kicad(I'm pretty sure that's what they said they used to make it) files, or maybe an openboardview [1] .brd file that would actually help for device repair and hacking on the phone at a hardware level. As a compa…

I don’t know what EDA software was used to produce the schematics, but it certainly wasn’t KiCad. Also from the overall style it looks to me like the schematics actually were created by some east asian ODM and not by Puri.sm themselves.

How can you tell? I'm curious as to which specific details you're referring to.

Re: Purism Librem 5 Hardware Schematics

#50
Nice move from puri.sm

At page 15 and 16 there are some M.2 connectors. One has an USB line named USB2_WIFI_D* and the other USB2_4G_D* so I guess these are used for 2 external radio modules (WIFI/BT and 4G).

I wonder what these modules are. Will it ship with the same from the devkit (RedPine WiFi/BT M.2 module on SDIO, SIMCom SIM7100E)? Pretty important from a security/privacy standpoint.

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