Something to be careful about - MediaTek has a reputation of being very hard to work with. As long as you're not trying to do anything beyond what Seeed Studio has already provided for, not a problem.

But if you run into something where you need MediaTek's help, you're out of luck.

Just hope I can save you that little discovery.

I know that a lot of documentation and support can be obtained from various Chinese sites, at least for MTK's phone SoCs. It's absolutely true that trying to approach them "through the front door" will not yield anything worthwhile, but the culture has found other means. If this one becomes popular, I expect the same to happen.

On the bright side, at least it's not Broadcom.

I start laughing when I saw the last sentence, in all my designs I tried to avoid Broadcom as much as possible. Same as Marvell, you don't get anything other than a two-page brief before you sign a NDA, and if you're not a volume player, you normally don't get a chance to even sign the NDA.

Marvell is getting slightly better with docs, but still light-year behind TI and Freescale, whose design docs are pretty much all publicly accessible.

Broadcom seems to be easing up a bit with their introduction of their WICED (pronounced Wicked) line of Bluetooth Smart and Wifi wireless modules.

- $20 dev board keyfob that connects to an iPhone our of the box. - lots of firmware source code examples - available iOS source code - free compiler toolchain and USB programming - open schematics and pcb files - open forum: http://community.broadcom.com/

As a designer, I know it's easy to have a bad experience with a particular manufacturer and then avoid them like the plague in the future.

One time we designed in an Atmel TinyAVR into something, and as soon as we finished it went completely out-of-stock for 12 months.

We had to throw the boards and firmware away and start from scratch again using a PIC.

(We've never used another Atmel processor after that.)

But I try to remember that it's just a bias in my mind, and personal biases don't always jibe with reality.

Rationally, I understand that Atmel's not a bad company just because they had one supply chain glitch 7 years ago.

So my advice is: try to keep an open mind.

I absolutely agree. I'm kind of selfishly pleased that my comment triggered you to share your war stories.

But I do hope that by publicly sharing what manufacturers are like to work with it prods them to be more open to the community in the future.

Or if not, that at least I can steer designers toward those companies that are easy to work with, and let market forces do the rest.

Agree with you ,the docs provided by TI and Freescale are pretty in details in their community

I'm assuming not, but does anyone know if the wifi/gsm/baseband code is open source? What benefit would having the GPS/SOC hardware data sheets provide if the firmware code is closed?

For GSM the baseband code is always closed. It is often loaded into the module. Part of a modular approval for PTCRB (as well as FCC/CE) is that the end user can't change the power and radiation profile of the device. This is one reason why the source is closed.

What you'd normally care about is the protocol to talk to that baseband. 9/10 for M2M applications it is the 3GPP AT Commands and PPP therefore you can pretty much use PPP dialer to talk to it.

Ahh I see. Thank you, you gave me a bunch of fun new things to google.

I recommend looking at the CELLv1 from SparqEE[1] if anyone is looking for a nice development board for RaspberryPi/Arduino. It supports 3G, not only GPRS as most of the other GSM boards available.

I received mine a few weeks ago and have been having loads of fun working with it.

[1] http://www.sparqee.com/portfolio/sparqee-cell/

LinkIt ONE integrates with 8 key features,ARM7 EJ-S™, GSM, GPRS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth BR/EDR/BLE, GPS, Audio codec, and SD card,which GPRS,GSM,Wifi functions can be used for IoT prototype,for wearables,BLE ,GPS,Audio are too important to without.I guess someone who have played Arduino can operate this board easily,now what I care is the software it supports.

Perhaps the resources column in linkit one page(http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/LinkIt-ONE-p-2017.html) show us something to get started

This turns your android into a the same type of shield.

http://1sheeld.com

It diffrent from 1Sheeld, LinkIt includes GPS/GPRS and runs an RTOS. So, you can make it work outside.

I see. Both look worth having.

This looks really interesting for e.g. tracking devices

There are plant of those available off-the-shelf from your favourite Chinese e-tailer (or eBay): http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=gps+tracker

Cool

Marvel! Name it Hunger ¡ jajajaja