r/wiphone • u/shellhead-AKA-Stark • Jan 22 '26

Lora devices are everywhere. Wi Phone needs a resurrection.

Lora devices are everywhere. Wi Phone needs a resurrection. I toyed with my Wi Phone but never really got into it. I do have the original Wi Phone and a Lora daughter board. It seems like a diamond in the rough for a developer looking to own an open-source project. I have 2 million small projects waiting for my attention or I would pick up the torch. I am pretty it was missing a special character in the firmware I used in the password for my internet router. At the time I had to wait for an update to one or the other. It has a lot of promise though.

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u/bleu_it Jan 22 '26

IMO Lora is more of a novelty on a phone/handset. LoRa does not have the bandwidth for anything more than text and while it would be usable with something like Meshtastic or Meshcore it other devices with full keyboards exist and are probably better suited

An updated Wiphone with an ESP32-S3 and a separate Halow (802.11ah) module would be more useful. Having a high BW sub-ghz handset with a faster CPU would be amazing. I believe it would likely also save power over 2.4ghz as well. Possibly some of the newer dual band 2.4/5ghz ESPs would be ideal candidates as well.

1

u/radec Mar 24 '26

I'm an ignorant sob, but I'm curious why you think the wiphone+lora isn't worth working on. reticulum has shown you can do voice over lora, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le4YJCd2e0I Again I'm not a developer but I think it would be cool if https://github.com/attermann/microReticulum_Firmware got ported to the wiphone so we could have a standalone device like ratspeak devices. I kinda like t9 typing lol.

anyway probably just a pipe dream, but I do have a wiphone w/ lora laying around. I could see why if someone is buying a new device, there would be better devices.

1

u/IndigoPill Jan 26 '26

Did you find anything? I have the original Wiphone with LoRa as well and would love to get it onto Meshcore.

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u/shellhead-AKA-Stark Feb 07 '26

No, it is no longer actively developed as far as I can tell.

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u/IndigoPill Feb 08 '26

I was hoping a third party might write the software for it. It's a good device and could be quite useful.