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As the person who made the phone, I think this is an interesting question. Do we say that Apple doesn't build computers themselves because they buy the CPU from Intel? Or because they use Qualcomm transceivers (and lots of other off-the-shelf components) in their phones? On the other hand, we probably wouldn't say someone made a phone if they just put it into a different enclosure. I can say that I spent a lot of time selecting all the components, putting together the schematic, routing the board, and writing the UI software. (All of that took a lot longer than laser-cutting the case.) Of course, it probably took a lot more work than that to create the GSM module. But that's also true of the microcontroller I'm using, the LCD, even the battery. Just about everything is built on top of the work of others (see the Toaster Project for an example of how hard it is to do otherwise). Interestingly, this critique hasn't really come up from the people I've worked with to build the phone. I explain the function of the GSM module (and the rest of the components) but after putting it all together, people don't seem to think of the phone as just a box for the module -- in part, I'd argue, because they realize how many other things are in there too. Again, though, there's a fundamental question here that I'm trying to explore with my research: what does it mean to do it for yourself? |
It's the same as:
"I don't code python, that isn't a real language, it does everything for you, unlike C!"
Really? Does everything for you? Good to know that you built your own transistors from scratch via materials that you mined out of the ground, while naked, using only tools that you scavenged out of the forest, and that you came up with the entire process yourself.
Seriously, this is cool.