What is the application of the thermal sensor? Why would I want higher price, higher complexity, higher weight, and higher energy consumption in order to have this sensor packed next to everything else?
The poster specified “FLIR Lepton 3.5” which is a product name rather than a device type. FLIR is an ancronym coined by the maker of the “FLIR Lepton 3.5” and stands for “Forward Looking Infra-Red”. Teledyne FLIR sells their products mostly to government law enforcement: border patrol, surveillance, search and rescue, security camera, grow-light drug grower detection, …
I am just thinking for a longer time that maybe the main problem of Librem 5 is that there are several very different use cases and Librem 5 tries to satisfy way too many user groups at the same time leading to many people disappointed and to splitting the highly limited resources to work on too many topics at the same time.
A 4G mobile phone that is more trustable than the mobile phones on the market.
An Android phone where you have real control over the camera, microphone, and wireless communication like LTE, WiFi, and Bluetooth.
A general purpose Linux notebook in the size of a Smartphone.
A Linux Smartphone.
Librem 5 tries to be all 4 at the same time and ends up in the middle due to limitations in the CPU and energy consumption.
So actually there could have been 4 different devices:
The first one could have been something with even less computational power than Librem 5, but do the job of being a secure mobile phone well. Kill switches, good battery life, stable modem, Linux based OS without modern apps. No desktop Linux apps. Weaker and less power hungry CPU. Something like the Precursor phone but better (Precursor does not even have a modem at the moment if I am not mistaken).
The second could be an Android Smartphone with stock Android that gives hardware control to the user. Just Android but with hardware kill switches for sensors, camera, microphone, Bluetooth, WiFi, and LTE modem.
The third is what Librem 5 currently tries to be, but the task is a huge one.
The fourth would be a Linux Smartphone without the security bells and whistles. Focus not on the higher hardware security compared to Android or iOS, but using similar SoC like Android and iOS and delivering just the Linux alternative so that the users benefit from the better performance and battery life and the ecosystem of apps gets developed. No better security. Just breaking the oligopoly of Google and Apple.
I think we suffer due to too high ambitions considering the limited resources. You see, if an engineer spends time to fine tune the thermal sensor and make it work and to write an app for the thermal sensor, the same engineer is not working on other topics. So you are not getting a better product. You are sacrificing the core functionality in order to get some decorations on the top.
I think the entire effort for Fir should be to refine the existing platform to make it better, adding a bunch of fringe devices to it at this stage makes no sense. Remember they are not Samsung, they can’t dedicate thousands of engineers to this. Make it smaller and more energy efficient is going to be a big enough challenge when you can’t use industry standard blobby hardware.
… which raises a good question: Is the proposed IR sensor even viable? i.e. is it blob-free?
Technically speaking, the Librem 5 already has IR hardware - but it is well beyond my knowledge as to what the overlap and gaps would be between the existing IR hardware and the proposed sensor.
GNU: Purism: Please make the Librem 5 Fir a Delicious Desing, and 5.0 Inch only.
Please add an infrared sensor in the front of Librem 5 next to 3.5mm jack
I think the IR sensor is more of a novelty thing. For the times you would use it couldn’t you use a USB sensor and just plug it into the L5? Like I said before, the biggest issue is refining what we already have. Power management is top priority I think because it’s a bit too reliant on being close to a power source to feel like you can spend the whole day on a charge. And other refinements like the gps/camera/bluetooth, that all needs to work better, mind you a lot of that is software development and not hardware.
The other thing is the user upgrade/service angle which I think isn’t what I thought it would be. It seems like that was touted as a feature but a dangerous one that potentially voids your warranty and that wasn’t emphasized enough in my mind. For modules with antennas a different solution other than the u.fl connector on the board needs to be developed. Even if they had a u.fl adaptor of some sort that was higher cycle count for connection/disconnection as new cards become available. People will want to upgrade these themselves but not if they are going to destroy a connector on a costly card or the mainboard itself.
Please please please remove in GeNUine FIR batch the RIDICULOUS mono speaker, add 2 LR next-gen stereous speaker. Purism you got it and put all the Manpower in Fir phone.
It should be able to support swapping with other modems and wifi/bluetooth cards more easily. Maybe come with a fast world modem out of the box. Also maybe improved modular design for repairability (maybe not as extreme as Fairphone but moving in that direction).
Fir: Please Please, Please Remove the Ridiculous sides Metals and only leave the Top and Bottom Metals. why? this will dramatically reduces the feeling of Heat when Holding it. Also add Fancy Metal to drain heat on up down…
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