New engineering students’ challenge: build your own mobile phone
The small wooden box does not look much like a phone, but it works
By Jukka Harju
At the Tampere University of Technology, the first course has already been completed where the freshmen engineering students get to build with their own hands a mobile phone that also works.
Naturally the idea seems difficult at first, but here I am sitting with a smoking soldering iron in my hand. Professor Karri Palovuori from the TUT Department of Electronics has promised to demonstrate some of the different phases of the mobile phone manufacturing course.
A mobile handset cannot be completed in one day, because for example the drying times of the glues and varnishes used in the process are long. Last autumn’s course lasted for six weeks, which translated to around 25 hands-on hours.
In the beginning there is... a printed circuit board. The exposure of the board takes place, followed by a lye bath, an application of the fluxing agent, and numerous small drillings.
“The idea is to give the students their first contact with electronics through a fun project”, Palovuori explains.
Palovuori digs out the first components.
The soldering iron is set to 380°C.
The resistor is only millimetres in size, but with the help of tweezers it soon finds its place on the circuit board.
Then comes the chip, followed by the microprocessor, the 44 small legs of which create a slightly more complicated soldering operation.
After that brifge is crossed, Palovuori already looks for the GSM module from his box of components. The soldering tasks become progressively more difficult.
“The purpose is intentionally to push the students' envelope a little bit so that they would learn.”
When the two circuit boards are ready, they have to be fitted into the casing.
The covers are made out of spruce and birch veneer. The processor is programmed and the prepaid SIM card is installed - again rather crudely with the soldering iron.
The battery used is not rechargeable.
Since we only have one day, many of the steps are skipped in the same fashion as in television cooking programmes, where a lot of the ingredients have been prepared in advance.
The finished product looks like a small flat wooden box.
There is no display, no keypad, and no antenna. Just tiny holes for the microphone and the speaker. But once the battery is connected to the phone, voilà, the LED display lights up.
And the device can be used for making phone calls.
“The price is slightly above that of the cheapest basic handsets”, admits Palovuori.
Then again, this is a hand-made product, after all.
Let’s give it a try.
And it really does work!
Then again, whyever not, when even the world’s very first GSM phone call was made in Tampere.
For everyday use, the DIY phone is a bit too crude.
One can only dream of text messaging, let alone such fineries as Net access, navigation, or cameras, and even the phone numbers are selected inconveniently by using a rotating dial under the birch veneer.
However, behind the primitive setup lies a deeper meaning as part of the otherwise so theoretical graduate engineering studies.
“The sound is weak on purpose, so that it would act as an incentive for the students to make the handset better”, declares Prof. Palovuori.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 9.2.2010
JUKKA HARJU / Helsingin Sanomat
jukka.harju@hs.fi
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| 9.2.2010 - THIS WEEK |
 New engineering students’ challenge: build your own mobile phone |
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