It means they're still looking into productising it themselves, and they won't release the schematics until a) they've got a shipment to sell, or b) they give up on dealing with the chinese scammers they're currently negotiating with.
I don't know. Personally, I've hesitated releasing designs and code that was messy, even if useful. It takes some work to release something. Maybe not much, but when it's a hobby project it's easy to put it off.
> The schematics and PCB layout have not been released, so the OTG messenger is not an open-source hardware project yet, but Trevor says it may become open source if there’s enough positive interest from the community. My disappointment is immeasurable.
It means they're still looking into productising it themselves, and they won't release the schematics until a) they've got a shipment to sell, or b) they give up on dealing with the chinese scammers they're currently negotiating with.
I agree that's what it looks like but I wonder what the point is of trying to make a business around some old hardware that's got questionable amounts of them still around
> If I make software I can see that if I hacked a giant crap of code together that I would want to clean it up before releasing it to public and save my self the embarrassment knowing I could do it better. I think hardware is the same way. There's also protocols to fabrication that may be difficult to explain. You have support requests and emails wasting your time. > "enough positive interest from the community". I d…
>People who offer comments on code beyond how to add material functionality (i.e. more inputs), make it faster, or decrease the code size are trash humans. I strongly disagree. Making code more maintainable and easy to understand is very important. Enforcing style guides is important
Depends on if other people are gonna work on it too, right? By barging in and telling people their indentation is messy because it's a mix of tabs and spaces which isn't consistent on your IDE, you take away the time they might otherwise spend on doing what they want. It isn't there for you, it's a passion project not a job.
Interesting, although using an already usability challenged platform like a cellphone to me isn't the best choice around. But I'm biased by having big fingers and some problems reading those small screens without my 2nd pair of glasses.
I'm still hoping the project below shows one day it's not a pile of vaporware.
There is no licensing issue, you can use LoRa without a licence (like Wi-Fi) in a few bands depending on the country / zone you're in (915MHz, 868MHz, 433MHz…). You have to respect duty cycles restrictions (not emit more than 1% of the time, for example) though if you're not listening to avoid collisions.
isn't also that all communication is required to be unencrypted?
What is the licensing issue with this? It is like Ham radio license ? Something else? India has started banning drones outright and walkie talkies are banned unless you have prior police verification. I think they demand that radio exam, Morse and all but im not sure. Where does this fit? Is it like cellular connection?
It uses a LoRa module, which is approved by the radio regulators as an ISM-band device in some jurisdictions, for example in the US:
As kid who grew up in countryside I would love to have one of these to talk to my cousin as we didn't have computer or internet, the year was 2004 and we used to send tons of SMS but were always short on credit