The youngest are much more aware of environmental issues than their elders, which does not prevent them from being very often addicted to their smartphone and from wanting the latest model. It is a reality of course imprinted with paradoxes, but awareness is rising or in any case evolving gradually. Gabriel Rochet, a 16-year-old high school student from Hauts-de-Seine, set himself an ambitious challenge three years ago: to design and manufacture a phone that is both more environmentally friendly, less expensive and easy to assemble.
Behind this project, the desire to demonstrate that it is necessary “rethinking the technology on the basic functionalities”. A refocusing on the essential functions that the high school student summarizes as follows: making calls, sending SMS, saving his contacts, having a clock and a calculator, not to mention two little games recalling the golden age of feature phones (Snake And 2048 as it happens). The telephone is designed to be modular, simple, easily repairable and robust. The young man has made the choice of free software, and proposes to animate his Paxo Phone an in-house operating system, paxos_8, the code of which he makes available on his site.
Full of projects
Highlighted recently by Alexis Kauffmann, free software specialist, on his account Twitter, the Paxo Phone project represents three years of work and prototyping to achieve a satisfactory product, but still perfectible. Gabriel Rochet indicates that “the project is not finished and that it is useless to build it for the moment”and also invites those interested in the project to stay informed of its evolution on a dedicated Discord server.
The Paxo is not designed to be sold, but so that everyone can make this feature phone. To do this, it will be necessary to have access to a 3D printer, welding equipment and a hot air gun, even an oven, according to its designer, who makes available all the elements created by him in real time. Gabriel Rochet has just launched a Leetchi kitty to help him finance the purchase of the components necessary for the development of his project. For now, the mobile, whose manufacturing cost is estimated at 30 €, includes a (resistive) touch screen of 320 x 480 pixels, a 2-core 240 MHz microcontroller (ESP32) or even a 2G modem, the SIM800L. As a reminder, this network will no longer be operated in France from the end of 2025 or the end of 2026, depending on the operators.
On his site, you can discover other products straight out of Gabriel Rochet’s brain, such as a Peltier lamp (the heat of the hand is enough to light its bulb), a battery tester, a wired speaker, a kit to understand the operation of a rotary electric motor, an environmental data analyzer or even an optical music transmitter (the music is transported by a luminous flux).