[carburetor]

a phone you refuel.

---

carburetor is a feature phone whose energy source is fuel, not battery. it is a working artifact, not a metaphor. two units. one chassis convention. one telemetry codec.

prerelease · v0.1 · mk i hardware in bench · mk ii in cad · sim headless only (browser at v0.2).

two units

mk i · field — the loud one. a cox tee dee .049 micro internal-combustion engine, a brushless outrunner used as a generator, a 300 f supercap bus, an 18350 li-ion buffer, an nrf52840, a sharp memory lcd, a blackberry q10 keyboard, a quectel bg95 modem. in a brunswick-green canvas case with brass terminals and a hand-crank that both starts the engine and bootstraps the mcu before the engine is running.

mk ii · pilot — the quiet one. a butane catalytic combustor over a thermoelectric stack, in an anodized-aluminum unibody. a 2.9" e-ink panel. a silicone keymat. the same modem. takes 45 seconds to wake.

mk i is loud. mk ii is silent. both wait. both ask you to wait with them.

three editions

the project ships at three levels of commitment — all implementing the same five-layer architecture, all emitting byte-identical telemetry:

• vapore — the simulator. $0. five minutes. browser only. (v0.2 — headless-only at v0.1.)
• processta — the maker edition. ~$120. one weekend. esp32-s3 + cheap nitro + tool-pouch case.
• classica — the definitive build. ~$760. multi-weekend. cox tee dee + bg95 + sharp memory lcd + q10 + brass + custom canvas.

see docs/editions.md for the comparison. the three editions exist to validate the architecture's "implementation swap" claim: if you cannot build a $120 version and a $760 version against the same interfaces, the interfaces are not interfaces.

receipts (not claims)

what	number	verify
fuel-to-usb efficiency (mk i)	⚠️ 5.4 ± 0.3 %	pnpm bench:fuel-to-wh against fixtures/golden/cox-049/manifest.json
warm-up time (mk ii)	⚠️ 45 ± 5 s	pnpm bench:warmup against fixtures/golden/catalytic-teg/manifest.json
sim state-machine totality	✅ pending v0.2	pnpm sim:test
bom resolvability	⚠️ pending	pnpm bom:resolve

⚠️ = measured at bench-prototype scale; pinned numbers ship at v0.2.

you cannot call on it

mk i and mk ii both speak cat-m1 / nb-iot only. data, sms, matrix, ssh — yes. voice — no. removing the voice radio removes the analog front-end, the regulatory burden, half the power budget, and most of the reason a phone has become whatever it has become. what is left is a thing that connects you to your people on schedule, briefly, after a warm-up.

architecture (five layers)

[ fuel ]        chemical potential
   ↓
[ combustor ]   chemical → mechanical / thermal
   ↓
[ bus ]         dc bus · supercap + li-ion buffer · mppt
   ↓
[ compute ]     mcu + display + modem
   ↓
[ ritual ]      sound · heat · light · weight · scent

each layer is a typed codec. each codec emits real artifacts: telemetry frames as csv, engine recordings as wav, screen captures as png, oscilloscope traces as svg. see docs/architecture.md.

two surfaces, one architecture

• typescript (strict) — the simulator, the site, the telemetry codec, the cli. packages/.
• python — the engine-thermodynamics prototype, the bom resolver, the adr analyses. python/sim_mini/.

both surfaces consume the same telemetry frame format. see docs/codec-protocol.md.

quickstart

pnpm install
pnpm build              # build the TypeScript simulator
pnpm sim:test           # run simulator tests
pnpm sim:headless       # headless run, outputs final state as json
pnpm sim:compare        # compare TS vs Python outputs
# pnpm sim              # v0.2 — browser playable simulator (not yet available)

docs map

• docs/why.md — the one-page thesis.
• docs/architecture.md — the five layers, with diagrams.
• docs/codec-protocol.md — the telemetry frame format.
• docs/hard-constraints.md — what will not change.
• docs/implementation-status.md — ships / partial / stub matrix.
• docs/contributor-map.md — where to enter as researcher / engineer / hacker.
• docs/tracks.md — researcher / engineer / hacker review contract.
• docs/engineering-discipline.md — change discipline and validation standard.
• docs/workflow.md — lightweight p-to-q PR, CI, and dependency policy.
• docs/notes/ — design notes, postmortems, sketches.
• hardware/mk1/ — bom. (kicad, freecad at v0.3.)
• hardware/mk2/ — (TBD.)
• packages/sim/ — @carburetor/sim · headless at v0.1, browser playable at v0.2.

how to help

build a unit. file a postmortem. send a photograph of where you put yours. fix a typo. prs welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Apache-2.0.