⌛️ Today is the last day of the Precursor 📱🛠️✨ campaign by the wonderful bunnie and xobs on Crowd Supply:

Precursor: Mobile, Open Hardware, RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC) Development Kit

Made For a Lab. Fits in a Pocket. Verifiable by Design.

Precursor is an open hardware development platform for secure, mobile computation and communication. This pocket-sized device accommodates a built-in display, a physical keyboard, and an internal battery while remaining smaller and lighter than the average smartphone. Precursor was built for use on the road, but it compromises nothing as a development platform. Powered by an FPGA-hosted, soft-core System-on-Chip (SoC), it gives developers the freedom to inspect, verify, and customize nearly every aspect of its operation. Help us take those critical first steps toward a world in which silicon-level trustworthiness is attainable.

Trust It. Because You Can, Not Because You Have to.

We are accustomed to accepting the word of large corporations, like Apple and Google, that our gadgets are trustworthy. Without any hard evidence, we’ve long had to take in on faith that our privacy is being respected and that our personal data is not just one backdoor away from being stolen, exploited, or exposed. (We’ll go ahead and leave “monetized” off that list, since we all know that’s happening.) We’ve had to accept this reality in large part because we’ve had no other choice. Precursor changes the status quo by making evidence-based trust a core principle of its design. We have subjected every aspect of this platform to a level of scrutiny that will allow users to trust their devices. You, the user, will be able to trust Precursor based on scientific evidence that is observable without access to a million-dollar microscope.

Situating Precursor Within the Device Ecosystem

We are the first to admit that Precursor isn’t for everyone. It’s a new class of development platform, made for security- and privacy-critical applications. We know it’s not going to replace your smartphone today. Rather, we see it as an indicator of good things to come from the open hardware ecosystem.