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This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

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Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#81

Post by gsich »

captainmuon wrote: post #9

The Quectel modems are fun parts. We are using one in a project as a kind of theft protection. I couldn't belive at first "this is a whole computer with Linux on it". I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. Is it for regulatory reasons, to protect their secret sauce, or for our convenience? On the one hand it makes simple things really easy with some AT commands, on th…

Baseband: yes

Rest: no. Some modem manufacturers have SDKs to get your application on the device as a feature.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#82

Post by gsich »

swiley wrote: post #66
Nextgrid wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not offload all that to the driver running on the main application processor? The risk of having a second, black-box running Linux is that it’ll get outdated and/or compromised and used as a persistence mechanism for malware.

Drivers on Linux usually mean GPL which freaks out modem manufacturers.

Yes, mainly because their code quality is absolute shit.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#83

Post by caslon »

bogwog wrote: post #80

So a modem on a pine phone can survive the HN hug of death (and the number one post no less)? Am I missing something here? Because there's no way I believe that!

A static site is really easy to host and HN's hug of death isn't actually that intense; the site itself only gets like six million views a day, a fraction of those click on every link, and no syndicated page has much reach.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#84

Post by ashkankiani »

I had been looking to do this exact thing for so long. It didn't occur to me that it was possible to unlock the AT commands for the pinephone. I just wanted to turn it into a modem. It's a pretty solid price for that piece of tech alone, since dev kit LTE modem boards are >$100 in all the places I could find.

Thank you, sincerely!

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#85

Post by cbradford »

vidarh wrote: post #70
cheschire wrote: post #25

Now it just needs to charge / run from solar and it can be dropped anywhere with signal. I wonder what sort of wattage this thing draws.

For a while I've really liked the thought of small little cheap hardened devices that could be surreptitiously dropped to act like wifi extenders as a "guerilla mesh". Of course there'd probably need to be some thought put into making them safe and look harmless enough not to trigger any kind of severe response if found. But imagine taking a bag around town and dropping "disposable" devices with low enough power use…

This is a fabulous idea. I would pay to fund that

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#86

Post by oblio »

stavros wrote: post #42
oblio wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started with a Pentium I, 166Mhz, 16MB, 1GB HDD, and I'm not even that old. I imagine we have folks here that started on a PDP :-) My P1 would stutter while playing MP3s :-))

166 MHz? You splurged for a good one! Mine was 100 MHz, the rest was the same though. 16 MB RAM, those weren't the days...

Don't be so sure. I got that PC in 98 (99?).

By that time I think Pentium III was close to launch or even already released.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#87

Post by andreidd »

amahajan wrote: post #46

I have been using these modems at work, specifically the EC25/EC20. They come with linux with some limitations. These modems are typically meant for IOT devices and you can get them for ~ 16/18 USD (or even lower). 4G/3G/2G, with around 128/256M flash and 128M RAM and 1.3GHz Arm Cortex A7. They are pretty powerful for their size, cost, current consumption and usability. Almost all such parts can be hacked across manu…

I'm a bit confused: does the manufacturer provide a toolchain to compile and run binary code on something that is not advertised as a SOM/SOC, but only as an lte modem?

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#89

Post by andreidd »

As somebody who is looking to start a comercial product that needs a cheap SOM with some IOT connectivity I'm wondering whether there is a module similar to the one in the OP, but actually advertised and sold as a computer module rather than just a lte modem. Does anyone know? Something like Onion Omega2s without the SPI bugs.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#90

Post by ashkankiani »

scoutt wrote: post #16
captainmuon wrote: post #9

The Quectel modems are fun parts. We are using one in a project as a kind of theft protection. I couldn't belive at first "this is a whole computer with Linux on it". I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. Is it for regulatory reasons, to protect their secret sauce, or for our convenience? On the one hand it makes simple things really easy with some AT commands, on th…

> I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. The alternative would be using an RTOS of some sort, implementing a full network stack (with > 100Mb throughput) and a USB device, as the bare minimum. Then you also have I2S audio, GNSS, etc. It probably makes more sense using an entire OS at some point. BTW, this is typical Qualcomm, that makes the chipsets for these modems.

I've been playing with the ESP32's a lot more recently (which go the RTOS route), and in reading the code for network stacks for these devices, it did occur to me how simple they were in terms of features. I wouldn't say that one needs the entirety of the Linux kernel to be able to implement all of those things, but it does build off of a more well used stack and reuses a lot of well-tested components.

So from this perspective, it's honestly more secure probably, too, as opposed to trusting a hardware company to hire embedded software engineers to reinvent an entire stack from scratch. The latter of which are in rare supply and we all know that reinventing things is a process that often leads to vulnerabilities.

Locking down the communication to just AT commands then makes sense for similar reasons.

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