WiPhone
Overview
The WiPhone is the radio-adjacent oddity in this lineup — not a radio at all, but an open-hardware ESP32-based SIP/VoIP handset from HackEDA that registers against a SIP account over Wi-Fi and places voice calls through the internet. It earns a slot because it is a hardware-hackable communication device with a real keypad, a colour LCD, a handset speaker and microphone, and — its actual product story — a back-of-PCB daughter-board connector that exposes the ESP32's GPIO/I²C/UART/SPI for community add-ons. This deep dive covers the open hardware and daughter-board surface, SIP/VoIP configuration, the battery and charging story, the firmware-update path, and the honest bench-drawer use-case framing. Migrated from the Scanners project as part of the Scanners/Radios restructure Stage 2 Phase 2 (2026-06-16).
Context
The WiPhone is 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi only — no cellular baseband, no SIM, no PSTN — so connectivity is Wi-Fi → SIP → internet → far end. It is not first-pick for anything in normal use; it earns the bench drawer in three contexts: a travel SIP-phone backup with no cellular dependency, a hackable phone form-factor for development experiments (the daughter-board connector plus open ESP-IDF firmware), and an ESP32/SIP/VoIP learning platform. Mid-2026 street price is ~USD 130-150 assembled. The seven v0.4rc1 vendor PDFs in `02-inputs/manuals/` are the load-bearing reference for any factual hardware claim; the exact firmware revision on the bench unit is a verification TBD carried inline.
