Collaborate Disseminate
For those of us who started experimenting with electricity when we were very young, one of the essential first skills was learning how to twist wires together. It seems like there’s not much to learn, but after a few failed attempts with nothing but your fingers, you learned a few …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Wire Splicing the Army Way
We think of the mobile phone — well, what we would call a cell phone — as something fairly modern. Many of us can still remember when using a ham radio phone patch from your parked car would have people staring and murmuring. But it turns out in the late …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Mobile Phones 1940s Style
[Max] had a rotary dial from an old telephone and — unsurprisingly — had nothing in particular to do with it. The simple answer? Use an Arduino Leonardo to turn it into a USB keyboard device.
Of course, the Leonardo can easily impersonate a USB keyboard, so that’s the easy …read more
It used to be that time was a lot more relative than it is today. With smartphones synced to GPS and network providers’ clocks, we all pretty much have access to an authoritative current time, giving few of us today the wiggle room to explain a tardy arrival at work …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: The Speaking Clock Goes Silent
Music, food, and coding style have one thing in common: we all have our own preferences. On the other hand, there are arguably more people on this planet than there are varieties in any one of those categories, so we rarely fail to find like-minded folks sharing at least some …read more
The Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS, doesn’t get a lot of love from the average person anymore. Perhaps once in a while a payphone will be of use when a phone battery has died, but by and large many people simply don’t have hardwired phones anymore. However, that doesn’t …read more
Continue reading Reverse Engineering a Telephonic Relay Device
We have to admit that this retasked retro phone wins on style points alone. The fact that it’s filled with so much functionality is icing on the cake.
The way [SuperKris] describes his build sounds like a classic case of feature creep. Version 1 was to be a simple doorbell, but [SuperKris] would soon learn that one does not simply replace an existing bell with a phone and get results. He did some research and found that the ringer inside the bakelite beauty needs much more voltage than the standard doorbell transformer supplies, so he designed a little H-bridge circuit …read more
Continue reading Retro Wall Phone Becomes A Doorbell, And So Much More
What does post-apocalyptic technology look like? Well, that kind of depends on the apocalypse. Regardless of the cause, we’ll need to be clever and resourceful and re-learn ancient crafts like weaving and pottery-making. After all, the only real apocalyptic constants are the needs of the survivors. Humans need clothing and other textiles. Fortunately, weaving doesn’t require electricity—just simple mechanics, patience, and craftsmanship.
If it turns out the apocalypse is scheduled for tomorrow, we’ll have piles and piles of e-waste as fodder for new-old looms. This adorable loom is a mashup of old and new technologies that [Kati Hyyppä] built at …read more
Given its appearance in one form or another in all but the cheapest audio gear produced in the last 70 years or so, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the ubiquitous VU meter is just one of those electronic add-ons that’s more a result of marketing than engineering. After all, the seemingly arbitrary scale and the vague “volume units” label makes it seem like something a manufacturer would slap on a device just to make it look good. And while that no doubt happens, it turns out that the concept of a VU meter and its execution has some serious …read more
Even though the age for first carrying a smartphone seems to be decreasing, there’s a practical lower minimum age at which a kid can reliably use one to make a call. So how do you make sure your tot can reach out and touch mommy or daddy? This toddler-friendly Raspberry Pi hotline is a good start.
With a long trip to Hawaii pending and a toddler staying behind, [kuhnto] wanted a way to make communication as simple as possible. In the days of pervasive landlines, that would have been as simple as a feature phone with a couple of numbers …read more
Continue reading Hotline Helps Toddler Keep in Touch with Mom and Dad