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PhoneFarm ReadMe

Note: This page is shared with Parakeet PhoneFarmer collaborators and is publically available.

What is PhoneFarm?

Sending out/ receiving SMS programmatically is expensive. PhoneFarm is a cheaper alternative, using smartphones with pre-paid sims to send out/ receive SMS programmatically for Studio Corsair's products.

Since PhoneFarms must be set up in the United States (since the phones will be using American Telecom providers), Studio Corsair is looking for PhoneFarmers, collaborators who will set up and maintain PhoneFarm hardware at their offices/ locations in exchange for a monthly payment of $200.payment.

Conceptually, this is like mining crypto. A PhoneFarm is a Raspberry Pi Computer connected to a handful of smartphones with prepaid SIM cards and you get (mostly) passive income by keeping the farm running.

Payment

Phone Farmers will be paid a base fee of $15 per month to run the farm, plus $5 for every phone on their farm. (We were originally planning on paying $200 flat per location, but decided it is fairer to pay more to Farmers who manage more phones).

Payment is at the end of the month (pro-prated for the number of days that you ran each phone).

Commitment/ Initial Signup

All Phone Farmers must have a minimum commitment of 1 year to this program.

Since phone numbers are tied to SIM cards and we need to use the same phone numbers to send out specific messages on behalf of our specific services, we can't "reroute" traffic from one phone to another. Once a phone has been added to the network and its phone number has been associated, it annoys our customers greatly if that phone (and its number) is no longer in operation since it is the equivalent of that number not working anymore.

Studio Corsair reserves the right to boot you from the program at any time for any reason. If you cannot keep your farm working properly, then you get the boot.

After you start our program, you will receive the initial hardware to start a Test Farm.

If you quit (or are booted) from the program, we ask that you ship any high-ticket item back to us.

Studio Corsair Responsibilities

  • All hardware (rasppi, phone, SIM cards, etc) and software expenses are the responsibility of Studio Corsair.
  • After you have completed the Initial Setup for a farm, Studio Corsair Engineers will remotely access the Farm computer and set up the software for the Remote Setup.
  • Studio Corsair will monitor the SMS capacity and uptime of the system.

PhoneFarmer Responsibilities

As the PhoneFarmer, you will have the following responsibilities:

Farmer Responsibilities

  • Please reply to any business-related message within 24 hours.
  • You must have the time to set up and maintain the farms.
  • Set up the farm within 3 days of starting the program.
  • Add new phones within 3 days of receiving them/ being asked to acquire a phone**.
  • Repair/ Restart any hardware on the farm within 2 days. (Less than 1 day if it is an emergency, please).
  • If you will be away from the farm for a while (if you're going on vacation or something), then please delegate someone who can fulfill your responsibilities until you return.

Electricity Requirements

You pay for the electricity to run the farm. However, the Bitcoin mining analogy falls apart here lol.

The estimated monthly electricity cost is low: ~$1 for the Test Farm and ~$12 for the Full Farm (mostly the UPS) (Source: ChatGPT4).

If a single farm's electricity costs ever go above $20 per month, Studio Corsair will re-reimburse you for anything above that.

We location that you run it in must have constant power. No rats nest wiring, no lights flickering, you should provide a power cable just for the phone farm. The Full Farm will have a UPS but we want to lean on the side of stability.

Internet Requirements

We need constant internet access, this cannot be a location where wifi/ internet drops sometimes. The RaspPi can be connected to your router via WiFi (or directly with an ethernet cable).

However, the internet bandwidth usage is very low, loading the main page of Reddit or your favorite social media website will probably use more bandwidth than PhoneFarm will in an entire day (if not an entire week lol), so you don't need to be concerned about it slowing down your other internet-connected devices.

Location Requirements

Once the farm is set up, it needs to run continuously since our customers will be using them to send SMS in/ out continuously.

Uptime and stability are paramount.

  • Constant access, this must be a location that you will have access to for a long time.
  • Protect the farm by putting it in a shoe box/ cardboard/ plastic box.
  • Constant Cell Signal, same as the above.
  • Close to T-Mobile (or alternative) Store, since you might need to pick up pre-paid SIMs in person.
  • Convenient access for for you. This must be a location that you can access without needing a key from anyone else, ideally less than an hour away from your residence.

Initial Setup

Initial Setup must be performed once per farm. We estimate that it will take probably an hour (depending on how techsavvy you are). You will also need to use the terminal on the Raspberry Pi to enter a few commands to enable Remote Setup, so you should be comfortable enough with opening the terminal and entering commands.

Setup the Rasp Pi

  • Install Raspberry Pi OS on the SD card, https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/
  • Insert SD Card
  • Power the Pi
  • Connect the Pi to your router (connecting a mouse/keyboard/monitor and doing it that way is the easiest, but you can also enter wifi settings when you installed the OS above)
  • Open the Rasp Pi's terminal and install tmate, https://tmate.io/:
sudo apt-get install tmate

Once installed, launch tmate with tmate. You should see something like ssh PMhmes4XeKQyBR2JtvnQt6BJw@nyc1.tmate.io (please provide us with the text that tmate provides so we can connect to it to perform the Remote Setup where we install the server and other software needed on the Pi). You will also need to provide us with the password that you chose when you set up the Rasp Pi.

  • Once Remote Setup is complete, you can continue with the Phone Setup.

Phone Setup

Phone Setup must be performed once per phone. We estimate it takes 10 minutes per phone (excluding time it takes for you to drive to the store and purchase SIM cards, if needed).

  • Enable Developer Mode on phone.
  • Purchase pre-paid (T-Mobile) SIM** and install it on the phone. If you purchase a pre-paid SIM card at the store, T-Mobile only asks for your name. Once we start to add a few devices to our farm, Studio Corsair will order SIM cards for you online (so you don't have to give your name to T-Mobile).

  • Connected phone to RaspPi and go through the popups on your phone: always allow USB debugging, Allow data access computer to access it (In general, always allow everything).
  • Label each phone with tape on the back with its phone number (so that you can tell them apart easily)
  • Contact us and confirm what the phone number for the new phone is.

Farm Growth

  • As the SMS demands of the business grow, you will need to add new phones to the farm and possibly add new farms**.
  • We estimate that with a USB switch, each farm can manage 5-10 phones.

Repairs/ Maintenance

We expect any maintenance to take a few minutes (restarting a phone) to maybe 10ish minutes

  • Replace any malfunctioning hardware at the farm**.
  • Plug/ unplug or restart devices when needed.
  • Replace SIM cards if there is an issue with them.

**Ideally, Studio Corsair will order these from the internet and have them shipped to you, but you might have to go to a store and purchase them. If you purchase them yourself, Studio Corsair will reimburse you for the purchase/ provide you with a corporate credit card (if possible).

Farm Hardware

Test Farm

The initial test farms will be composed of a RaspPi computer and a smartphone.

Once this proof of concept has been tested remotely by Studio Corsair staff over a few weeks (and we've ironed out any issues), we will scale out to a Full Farm.

The Test Farm will take up less space than a shoe box (and the box will be mostly empty). The hardware components (not including power cables) will take up the size of ~4 smartphones (since a RaspPi is the size of ~3 smartphones + the Phone itself).

Full Farm

Each full farm will be composed of:of the following:

  • Possibly a UPS, Uninterruptible power supply
  • A Computer, RaspPi which runs our server that controls the USB switch, and communicates with the phones
  • USB Switch to control which phone is connected to the computer
  • Some Android (Lollipop or Later) phones (with pre-paid SIM cards). As the volume of SMS increases over time, more phones would be added to the farm (and more farms would be created).

We estimate that the Full Farm will take up 1 to 2 shoe boxes in size. It contains all the components in the TestFarm and adds a USB Switch (~ size of 6 smartphones) and a UPS (we are targetting a small one, ~ the size of a shoe box), as well as all the extra phones.

FAQ

How many phones will you need in total across all the farms?

For our current volume, we estimate that we will need 15 to 100 phones (probably closer to 20).

This depends on how many on how much "SMS bandwidth" we can squeeze into a single phone (which needs to be experimented with).

Ideally, we would like to have as few farms as possible, each with as many phones as possible.

How much is the SMS volume per device?

~ 6 messages/ minute max. We are targeting for 10-40 customers per device (this will be experimented with).

How often do I have to change/ add new devices?

Ideally, we will batch as many device/ SIM shipments together as possible, the goal is to only need 1 monthly capacity increase Maximum.

Didn't you try to do this last year?

Yes, but the previous version was much more complicated, had a dedicated Android App, and Studio Corsair couldn't update things remotely, we decided to scrap the v1 and rewrote the entire software stack to make things much simpler. There is no more Android app and less responsibilities for the PhoneFarmer.

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