Albert Gajsak and his team of engineers from Makerbuino were frustrated about their smartphones. Most people have smartphones and have built some parts of their schedules or lives around the phones, but know a very small amount of what’s inside the phone or how the phone works. Their latest project, the MAKERphone, was built around the concept of teaching people that every machine has been designed by a human being and can be broken down into components and systems. The MAKERphone is an educational mobile phone that users can assemble and program, and currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the first units.
The platform is designed to teach electronics and coding, with a focus on the functions of a smartphone and its components along with Python, Scratch and Arduino programming. A soldering iron and solder, diagonal cutters, a screwdriver and insulating tape are required to assemble the phones, and if a user doesn’t have those tools available one of the options for the campaign supplies a set. One option also supplies a fully assembled phone, but that feels like the user is intentionally taking him or herself out of the maker experience. The kit has been tested on users as young as eleven years old and the estimate for a full build is around seven hours.
MAKERphone’s kit comes with the printed circuitboard, the casing, a 128*160 full color thin film transistor LCD, the GSM module, a dual-core processor with built-in Wi-Fi / Bluetooth / charging circuit, sound module, amplifier module, stick-on antenna, and customizing accessories. The market for projects that teach about electronics and coding is dense, but this addition of a phone for makers has a polished feel to it. The campaign video is quirky and humorous, befitting a company started by a 19 year old Croatian maker. The campaign has already passed its modest funding goal and ends on November 22, 2018.