Flutterby™! : Building your own cell phone

More Emerging Telephony Conference, Surj Patel on building your own Linux based cell phone using a Gumstix SBC with an LCD driver, interfacing to the aforementioned GM862 which has speaker and microphone drivers, a battery charging circuit. The microphone should be balanced and buffered, they're looking at a Star Micronics mic that's super tiny, they're using a standard piezo ringer and a MM74C922 key encoder for their keyboard.

The particular applications they're looking at are things like putting bar code or RFID sensor in a device that's actually cell phone sized. The big challenge is building small devices. Total cost of parts is about $400, which is a bit high, but gives an open platform (which is probably easier to interface to than a Linux based PDA).