Welcome to the proteusdevice wiki!

This repository contains documentation for Proteus mobile device, which is not a phone.

• Use cases
• Device flyer PDF
• Specifications PDF
• Twitter
• Reddit thread

Introduction

Proteus is a internal project name for Privecall family of devices. We decided go public with the design and offer it to industrial developers to check things out. Projects with this platform has been targeted towards critical infrastructure/industrial/medical/information security – where consumer platforms are unable to support required features and computational freedom.

Use cases

We will expand visibility through our github account to use cases, where we explore what we’ve been doing with our platform. Since projects and customers are partly confidential, we need strip some details to minimum but still – it should give you big picture.

Multi-party protocol

Most of the use cases and solutions are based around our multi-party protocol, which provides some unique possibilities to authentication, integrity, confidentially and privacy. Between multiple parties.

Getting started with hardware

Console access

Proteusdevice comes with unclued display and you can solder console access to device easily. We recommended that you use some wirewrap wires to pads and some headers to feed serial cable to unit. You can keep this small header part between display and PCB when console access is not used.

• Headers
• USB 3V3 serial cable, eg. TTL-232RG-VREG3V3-WE

Ethernet port

See hardware pdf for pin out if you like to make your own ethernet cable or order '#11050 ethernet cable' with your device.

uboot access

With terminal (115200 bps) connected to console serial, you can intercept (with esc key in 2 second delay) or observe uboot (which is totally open) booting the device.

LED's on device

On hardware pdf you can see led's presented at bottom of device display. They aim to give user better understanding wired ethernet state, wifi status and charger status. There is one white led for user to use as notification (via Linux led subsystem).

Haptic motor

There is vibration motor on PCB and it's user controllable with GPIO access.

Memory

Screenshot of htop running on freshly booted device with dropbear, systemd, network manager and weston up and running, taking 69 MB of RAM.

Q&A

Q: “Is this in development still?”

A: Yes and no. We never stop developing, but “proteusdevice” is solid and available hardware. We’ve had non public design(s) at hand for few years and worked through variants to this point.

Q: “What is availability?”

A: We do have stock of devices and they are world wide available for development/engineering purposes. However stock runs out now fast, as we came out with this capability.

Q: “Can I buy one? And what is pricing?”

A: Yes you can. Email us to get pricing and shipping options.

Q: “Does it have any applications?”

A: “proteusdevice” is development tool for engineering purposes. It does not have any end user usable applications but you are able to boot it up to Linux 5.4 kernel and root file system with QT 5.12 and sample UI application. From there on you should be your own master.

Q: “Does it have battery?”

A: Yes it does. 3500 mAh which gives between 4 to 7 hours operating time. See hardware PDF in github for battery capacity graphs.

Q: “Can I run Linux distributions on this?”

A: Probably you can (if 1 GB RAM and 8 GB emmc is enough), we have no experience of such. We build kernel + rootfs to boot up weston + QT 5.12 with an applications.

Q: “No usb for data and no micro SD. How do transfer files in/out apart from through ethernet?”

A: There are ways to connect and transfer data over Ethernet and Wifi. There is undocumented microsd card holder on PCB, so feel free to test it out. Absense of USB data should give you some vibes if OPSEC is important to you ;)

Q: “Does it have LTE?”

A: No it does not have LTE (or any other cellular connectivity). It does have Ethernet on system connector and adding communication via it is possible. However “proteusdevice” is a version we currently chose to be publicly available. Absense of LTE should give you some vibes if OPSEC is important to you.

Q: “8gb of storage is too small.”

A: We’ve done miracles with it :)

Q: “A very neat idea, but I’m afraid they couldn’t convince me to buy something like this. I already have my old Note 4 running linux.“

A: As we are not targeting consumer domain, we are both happy as it is. If you’re after some serious integration capabilities to life cycle managed hardware and in house compiled truly transparent software, we might have shared interest.

Q: "What is difference between PrivecallTX vs proteusdevice?"

A: "proteusdevice" is development unit and PrivecallTX is product. We try to keep focus on development unit here. If you're interested about other solutions, contact us.