pinephone_modem_sdk VS hologram-python

Hey, that looks really cool. I've been wanting to mess around with this stuff on PinePhone, which is in a unique position here since there are third-party images for the baseband which are mostly open source[1].

I've been especially interested in trying to reverse engineer what's going on with Google Fi on Android, but it is definitely a bit over my head, given that until recently I didn't even really know what an AT command was :) I'm guessing since it's Google the carrier stuff is mostly for fallback and all of the actually interesting stuff is done using protobufs over a data connection. (Fi is also interesting because you can make phone calls on the web over WebRTC. I wonder if that's some kind of gateway to SIP, or what.)

[1]: https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk

Ironically modules made by Quectel are GPL compliant (https://www.quectel.com/quectel-open-source) and you can build custom firmwares for them (https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk) to strip out any OTA logic.

Fibocom, on the other hand, not so much.

I have a PinePhone Pro, and I'm trying to figure out a reasonable way to get more than one half of ten minutes of battery life out of it, while still receiving notifications. I figure the best route to go will be to create a service that holds ports open, while the CPU is completely asleep, and either run it on the modem's processor or, as an possibility for the PinePhone Pro, but not the original Pinephone, run it on the m0 core used for power management.

At this moment, Mobian on the PPP with the Modem SDK ( https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk/releases ) and a few tweaks to the sound, the phone is great, the power is managed well, and the camera is usable. So I vote for Mobian Phosh as the current best. None of the OSs available are entirely stable on updates, so you still need to be careful.

I use this one with my Steam Deck. It uses the quectel eg25, same as pinephone, and can can be used with the fancy custom firmware.

OVMS is a not cheap module. It comes with a hologram.io SIM card, but you can use any data-only LTE plan. Cost for the module is over $250, and then you'll have to pay somewhere south of $5/mo for a data plan if you go with hologram.io.

An LTE plan from hologram.io is a few bucks a month... and i'd gladly pay it and not give my money to OnStar's broken stuff :-).

You could build out something using Arduino or similar. It's a very heavy lift, especially if you don't have experience using Arduino/similar build-your-own-hardware stuff. But you can find an Arduino as a processor, a GPS module, an IoT/Cell data module, and either battery or some wiring to plug it into another power source, and write your own custom code that will turn the unit on and report location at an interval of your choosing. I'm guessing that'd cost roughly $50-150 for initial hardware depending on options, and you'd need to pair it with monthly cell data service, like hologram.io.

I want to lead off with a big shout-out to Botletics and their (his?) SIM7000 LTE CAT-M1 shield. From the beginning I knew I was going to need wireless connectivity and that WiFi was not going to reach. I considered Blues Wireless, but ultimately went with Botletics + hologram.io and I'm extremely glad I did. I plugged it in, I lightly modified the example code (it was pretty close to what I needed already, I basically just took out the GPS reading and replaced it with an averaged HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor reading) and it just worked.

Companies use hologram.io sim cars in their devices and trackers and no consumer knows this unless they take the device apart and inspect the sim car and look up what the logo is.

hologram.io

If you can't get Ethernet then Cellular modem is best. For devices I rarely need to talk to I use hologram.io and it costs me a few dollars/year (under $10USD). Otherwise get a real cellular plan. Hologram has some nice software to make it easy to communicate.

i will be trying the mkr nb 1500 with the hologram.io sim card. hologram has a pilot program that includes 1mb of free data per month which should cover texts that aren't sent all the time. i mention this incase anyone else stumbles on this in search of a similar solution.

Depends how open you mean. For a lot of hobbyists and integrators, this works:

https://github.com/hologram-io/nova-hardware

And run this on a Pi:

https://github.com/hologram-io/hologram-python

If you need something one layer deeper on the module or chipset level, there’s not really a lot out there.