pinephone_modem_sdk VS nova-hardware

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.

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.