Belgium-company Citronics has designed a router based on the mainboard of the Fairphone 2 smartphone, connecting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 “system-on-module” to a carrier board with Ethernet, USB ports, and other connectors, while leveraging 4G LTE, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity from the phone’s core board.
Citronics devkit:
- Fairphone 2 mainboard
- SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 (MSM8974AB) quad core Krait 400 processor @ up to 2.26 GHz with Adreno 330 GPU
- System Memory – 2 GB LPDDR3
- Storage – 32GB eMMC flash
- Connectivity – 2G/3G/4G LTE, dual-band WiFi 5 up to 433 Mbps, Bluetooth 4.0 LE; Note: antennas not provided
- Various expansion connectors
- Storage – SD card slot (not shown on photos)
- Networking – 10/100M Ethernet port
- USB
- 4x USB 2.0 Type-A ports
- 1x USB Type-C port for power only?
- Expansion – 40-pin Raspberry Pi-compatible GPIO header with UART, SPI, I2C
- Power Supply – 5V to 60V via USB-C PD, PoE
- Power Consumption – 2 to 20 Watts
- Dimensions – 12.5 x 6.5 x 1.8cm
- Weight – 99 grams
The devkit comes preloaded with Alpine Linux OS. There’s not that much to see on the website, but we are told that “a comprehensive wiki site to support developers is under construction. It will be online at delivery time”. Delivery time means March 2025, so later this month.
I was also informed by email that Spin42 worked on Buildroot support with the kernel being a fork of mainline Linux. Debian is also being worked on, but nothing has been released just yet.
Besides the devkit, Citronics can also provide custom microcontrollers based on the Fairphone 2 mainboard and one example is a residential heating optimization box by Destore whose electronics are shown above. Other partnerships led to the creation of sustainable computing platforms for machine vision classes at UCLouvain university and monitoring and control gateways for Karno (again for heating control). The company also developed a solution with 25 synchronized displays based on Fairphone 2 boards currently used by artists and companies.
Samples of the Citronics DevKit can be pre-ordered for 150 Euros including VAT through a Google Doc form. The company stresses that the kit is for professional customers aiming at prototyping and R&D activities, and NOT intended for average consumers. Antennas are not provided, so you’d have to handle that yourself. Delivered are expected to start this month (March 2025).
Thanks to Zoobab for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Only 10/100 @ 2-20watts? I like the idea but the results and not worth it, especially at the power consumption..
It’s actually much less than that. Tests are ongoing.
It’s not really a router so much as the devboard that came out when they repurposed a recycled 2015 smartphone board by slapping some ports the SoC was supporting and appropriate power delivery.
The specs do seem to best fit the machine vision use case they proposed like license plate readers or traffic cameras as those could make good use of the LTE modem and GPU. Robotics could also work if opencv runs on this thing. But I’m guessing you’re not going to get much in the way of GPU cost-performance out of this old SoC so maybe just slapping a few power switching relays like their other customers did to run some edge automation makes sense? Honestly I think what would have really worked well is if they could put these in all-in-one touch monitors for PoS like restaurants menu orders and ATMs… But I guess they couldn’t figure out the video out or something.
Anyhow, it is what it is.