How Opensource friendly is RePhone's software platform ?

End-Of-Life Products & Services RePhone
#1

Hi,

As an opensource enthusiast I came to this brilliant RePhone and ready to support it as any open source project related to libre telephony.

Now. I am considering to buy a RePhone,
but I need to be convinced about its openness of development.

I made a couple of research, and I wanted to have confirmation about those quick statements :

  • It’s running MT2502 : a ARM7 SOC compatible w/ ARMv5 ABI ,

  • Shipped OS is a closed RTOS (NucleusOS ?) , no FLOSS OS supported at the moment

  • Supported development tools are for windows only ?

  • JS should be the best option for GNU/Linux users :

  • Device support BlueTooth 4 (LE) , which profiles ?

  • Is gcc toolchain available in source / binary form ?

I will update this 1st post , if my statements are false or outdated to avoid confusion of readers, or add more questions.

Thanks anyway for supporting OSHW

#2

Hi,

  • MT2502A is a ARM7 EJ-S SOC.
  • It is a closed RTOS, but support thread and event callback.
  • For windows support Arduino, Eclipse, makefile & gcc, for linux only support makefile & gcc.
  • Bluetooth support SPP, Notification and GATT.
  • Firmware is not support in source, it is support binary and API.
#3

True. And, as far, as I understand, it will never be. Although, depends, what you calling RTOS in this case: “firmware” (bootloader), which loads your sketches, or default “sketch” with basic phone interface. I just talked about first one. THe second one, is kinda open source an lays on the github.

And I very very like to see (and patch) the sources of first one, and add some missed features there.

Unfortunatelly, true. At least, documentation. While there is ports of Arduino IDE under GNU/Linux somewhere in neighbour thread. There is native Eclipse IDE on GNU, but I doubt about plugins.
And, unfortunately, there FirmwareUpdater tool, which is only available for Windows.

I’d say Lua :smiley:

That info was somewhere in neighbour threads.

Depends what do you want about it. Not sure about “byte-to-byte” (patch-to-patch) one, but you can either use Official ARM Toolchain, which is shipped with both binary and sources form (although, there is broken libc.a in latest release), or, if you’re using gentoo, use “crossdev” tool to prepare arm-none-eabi toolchain (will require patched newlib ebuild).