David Hunt writes about Raspberry Pi projects, including a DIY smartphone, camera builds, benchmarks, and home InfiniBand networking.
Commenters link his posts for the Raspberry Pi camera as a USB webcam, the PiPhone, and a note that InfiniBand at home may underdeliver.
You can do InfiniBand on the desktop, but it necessarily doesn't give the performance you might be expecting. I think I read about this on HN originally...
http://www.davidhunt.ie/infiniband-at-home-10gb-networking-on-the-cheap/
Edit: From the edit on the follow-up post about getting it working on Ubuntu:
>Note: iperf maxed out at 1.2 gbps, and on the current linux install, I couldnt get netperf client working at all. netserver would work, but only showed a throughput of 25mbps from a Win7 client. HOWEVER, when I set up the raid with 6 old 160G drives, the “hdparm -t /dev/md0p1″ showed 250MB/sec reads, and I got the same from the Win7 machine using samba across the infiniband fabric. This seems to indicate that iperf and netperf are completely unreliable for testing this type of connection. Bear in mind though that I did have netperf running on the previous ubuntu install, but that installation was so messy I don’t know what drivers and user-space software was running. I reckon it’s the kind of think that may be fixed in the stock Ubuntu install in the near future. For the moment, just go with real-world testing, i.e. copying large files from ramdisk to ramdisk, for example.
What would be the price you and the GP be willing to pay for this ? What screen size do you expect ?
I have been thinking about this lately - about building one for myself. I don't like andriod/ios smartphones and every time my phone breaks down for some non-replaceable component, I have to hunt for a new phone which isn't either.
Something similar to this - http://www.davidhunt.ie/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-smartphone/
Make it product worthy, with a browser and a simpler os which users can understand and modify. Which doesn't cripple the hw, exposes it to the user to exploit it, is modular so the parts can be swapped.
But then I realize not using a smartphone would be a simpler solution.
I've always had an iPhone (since 3g) and recently picked up an Android phone for testing, and played with that. While I can't really complain about either phone, all I've really wanted is Linux on my phone.
This is the phone I want. The appeal of Linux on the phone is too much for me. As long as it can make and receive calls and somehow deal with SMS, I can take care of the rest.
I've entertained the idea of building a PiPhone [0] and trying it out for a few days.
[0] http://www.davidhunt.ie/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-smartphone/
Surprisingly so, I use uv4l¹ for capturing 720p60 and 1080p30 and it has worked well, though I don't know if this method would work in your use case, since all it gives is a raw h264 stream over http, and a browser preview into it.
¹ http://www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera-setup-for-low-latency-video-conferencing/
here's a couple of links discussing how to set up and working through the issues.
http://www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-zero-with-pi-camera-as-usb-webcam/
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=148361
One of these is what I'd go for. Build the phone out of a raspberry pi.
https://hackaday.io/project/19035-zerophone-a-raspberry-pi-smartphone
http://www.davidhunt.ie/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-smartphone/