Open source SIM card emulation, SIM card proxying: BLADOX

I've been extremely positively surprised as I recently discovered bladox, a company specializing in providing development tools and custom hardware to simulate, proxy and extend SIM cards. And not only that, they are completely based on gcc + binutils as well as their own open source software. There couldn't be any better playground to play with the SIM interface of any mobile phone.

The general idea is to put an ATMega128 in between your real SIM card and the actual SIM card slot of the GSM mobile phone. On that ATMega128, you can then do whatever you want, e.g. forward only certain commands, such as "perform GSM algorithm" to the actual SIM, and implement the rest in your microcontroller. You can obviously also implement STK applications yourself for demonstration, or you can even block all STK commands and suppress the phone from ever knowing that the SIM actually supports STK.

This is an excellent playground. And it's even sold at a very affordable price. Now if I only had more time to look into all of its exciting possibilities while not forgetting about my other tasks (and paid work) :)

Maybe there are some readers of this blog who are just as interested but didn't even know that such products (and all the example code) did actually exist. Now you know :)