Collaborate Disseminate
Brrrrrrrring! Movies and TV are one thing, but the siren song of a rotary phone ringing in the same room as you is one of those sounds you carry forever. …read more Continue reading Hackaday Prize 2022: Vintagephone Links the Past to the Present (and Future)
[Kevin] has long wanted to do something musical with a vintage rotary phone and an Arduino, and has finally done so and committed the first of several experiments to HTML …read more Continue reading Rotary Phone MIDI Controller Still Makes Calls
One of the useful side effects of the ubiquitous availability of cellular network data modules is that they can be used to create custom mobile phones. It’s surprising in a way that we don’t see as many of these projects as we’d expect, but by way of redressing that deficiency …read more
Continue reading A Mobile Phone For The Pulse Dial Generation
Purposely choosing obsoleted technology combines all the joy of simpler times with the comfort of knowing you’re not actually stuck with outdated (and oftentimes inferior) technology. The rotary phone is a great example here, and while rarely anyone would want to go back to the lenghty, error-prone way of dialing …read more
Continue reading Rotary Phone Takes You Around The World And Through Time – With Music
As wonderful as mechanical keyboards are, most of the pre-fab and group buy models out there have zero media controls. If you want rotary encoders and OLED screens to show what function layer you’re working in, you’ll probably have to build your own keyboard from the ground up.
Hackaday alum …read more
Rotary dial phones have a certain romantic charm about them; something never quite captured in the post-Touch Tone era. With landline phone services less popular than ever, these old workhorses aren’t really cut out for daily use anymore. However, with a modern brain transplant, they can still get the job …read more
Right up front, let us stipulate that we are not making fun of this project. Even its maker admits that it has no practical purpose. But this 3D-printed Commodore-style rotary dial keypad fails to be practical on so many levels that it’s worth celebrating.
And indeed, celebrating deprecated technology appears …read more
Continue reading 3D-Printed Rotary Dial Keypad Is Wonderfully Useless
It may seem like an odd concept to younger readers, but there was once a time when people rented their phones rather than buying them outright. Accordingly, these phones were built like tanks, and seeing one of these sturdy classics of midcentury modern design can be a trip down memory lane for some of us. So retrofitting a retro phone with a Raspberry Pi and Google’s AIY seems like a natural project to tackle for nostalgia’s sake.
The phone that [Alasdair Allan] decided to hack was the iconic British desk telephone, the GPO-746, or at least a modern interpretation of …read more
Continue reading Classic British Phone Gets a Google Makeover
The 1970s called and they want their rotary dial cell phone back.
Looking for all the world like something assembled from the Radio Shack parts department – remember when Radio Shack sold parts? – [Mr_Volt]’s build is a celebration of the look and feel of a hobbyist build from way back when. Looking a little like a homebrew DynaTAC 8000X, the brushed aluminum and 3D-printed ABS case sports an unusual front panel feature – a working rotary dial. Smaller than even the Trimline phone’s rotating finger stop dial and best operated with a stylus, the dial translates rotary action to …read more
Continue reading Rotary Cell Phone: Blast from a Past that Never Was
The 1970s called and they want their rotary dial cell phone back.
Looking for all the world like something assembled from the Radio Shack parts department – remember when Radio Shack sold parts? – [Mr_Volt]’s build is a celebration of the look and feel of a hobbyist build from way back when. Looking a little like a homebrew DynaTAC 8000X, the brushed aluminum and 3D-printed ABS case sports an unusual front panel feature – a working rotary dial. Smaller than even the Trimline phone’s rotating finger stop dial and best operated with a stylus, the dial translates rotary action to …read more
Continue reading Rotary Cell Phone: Blast from a Past that Never Was