Pandelphi welcomes a new contributor, @Arsenijs

This is very exciting, because he's bringing with him an awful lot of new capabilities in the form of his #ZeroPhone - a Raspberry Pi smartphone 

This device will power Cub's brain, instead of a regular Pi Zero. There are several very good reasons for this. Currently I'm using a Pi Zero W wired to an Adafruit PWM driver board to control the servos, and an ATMega 328 to read the sensors. To avoid any conflicts with level-shifting, and keep the wiring simple, it uses the two-wire I2C bus.

Having worked with Ars since ZP Gamma, I know a fair bit about the insides of that too, and its remarkably similar to what I'll need in the robot. The I2C backbone, power management, keyboard interface and networking are all thoughtfully considered solutions to ZeroPhone's requirements and I realised I was reinventing Arsenij's epic design.

True, the keyboard itself wont be needed and the 328 will be reprogrammed to handle the sensor net. But other than that its the same.

Cub's camera is a standard webcam, plugs into the USB port on a physical level and integrates into Gaussians which now runs as a ZeroPhone App.

The display can also be co-opted to fit behind an eye and provide visual feedback on the system status as well as full diagnostics.

And of course there is the Modem. This is highly useful, because currently Echo cannot talk directly to phones, and the messaging is limited to other Echos. Find My Phone only works in the US too. Using ITTT I can bridge between the Echo and GPRS to send and receive content with any phone.
Possibly, I can also use the modem to run Alexa outside a WiFi hotspot too.

Another less-than-clever part of Echo's design is an inability to control its audio hardware. Luckily it has a line-out and boots up to its last volume setting, so I can set and ignore it, and use the ZeroPhone's amplifier to control it.

Finally, there is an extensive set of plug-in boards Ars has designed to allow ZP to do its job. It is a hacker's phone after all, and part of it's feature set is an ability to communicate with just about everything. From microwave Radio to IR and UV, plus networking - and it's a standard protocol and pinout.