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Rotary Cellphone

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Re: Rotary Cellphone

#51

Post by krilovsky »

pratio wrote: post #40
krilovsky wrote: post #6

Calling this open source is a bit of a stretch. At the heart of this phone there is a huge proprietary dependency (the Adafruit FONA module).

It goes opensource in my book maybe you will create an opensource alternative for the hardware. This sort of gatekeeping is maybe the reason why hobbyists avoid HN.

Huh? I didn't say that wasn't a cool project. On the contrary, I think this is a great project even if it was all closed source.

Maybe I should have clarified that I just meant to highlight the fact it's almost impossible to understand what many of the devices around us are doing because of the dependency on fundamental building blocks which are closed source and have no open source alternatives.

I'm sorry if my comment came out offensive in any way. That wasn't my intention.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#52

Post by bluGill »

ssfivy wrote: post #25
jamiethompson wrote: post #24

I use an unmodified rotary phone as my main landline phone. In the UK it would seem that our exchanges still support pulse dialling. The only drawback are menu systems that expect to hear tones, but I get around this with a small app on my mobile phone that just plays DTMF tones. If i want to, i can pick up the receiver and play tones down it to dial a number rather than using the... dial.

Why do you stick with the rotary phone? Also, isn't it easier to have a second landline phone attached vs having to play DTMF tones from a phone app?

If it works don't break it. Those old phones could stand nearly any abuse unlike modern phones that break if you look at them wrong...

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#53

Post by DonHopkins »

soliton4 wrote: post #30

in order to one up this very cool project one would have to: - create a cellphone in a Telephone magneto style from before there were rotaries - train a machine learning algorythm to emulate the behavior of a Switchboard operator so you can have the truely "authentic" old school behavior

You could define a class called RingyDingyEnumerator!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffxVap-1L1Y

Speaking of "old school", I love watching Joan Rivers shamelessly plug MCI, after which she audaciously asks Ernestine how old she is and grills her about her sexuality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3AujuB_3Zs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Tomlin

> In 1970, AT&T offered Tomlin $500,000 to play her character Ernestine in a commercial, but she declined, saying it would compromise her artistic integrity. In 1976, she appeared on Saturday Night Live as Ernestine in a Ma Bell advertisement parody in which she proclaimed, "We don't care, we don't have to...we're the phone company." The character later made a guest appearance at The Superhighway Summit at UCLA on January 11, 1994, interrupting a speech being given on the information superhighway by then-Vice President Al Gore. She appeared as three of her minor characters in a 1998 ad campaign for Fidelity Investments that did not include Ernestine or Edith Ann. In 2003, she made two commercials as an "updated" Ernestine for WebEx.

phone company sketch - we dont care - Tomlin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw

Ernestine's House Call - Saturday Night Live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TbI_1XoJN0

Ernestine the telephone operator calls General Motors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT4__Nz5HWY

Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the Telephone Operator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0l9fE2RAj8

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#54

Post by pjc50 »

adrianN wrote: post #5

> the battery lasts almost 24 hours It seems like for hobby projects it's really hard to get good battery run times. I wonder why that is. Is is difficult to get everything into the appropriate sleep modes, or are hobbyist parts just that much more power hungry? Commercial feature phones have stand by times measured in weeks.

The battery looks like it might be this one: https://www.adafruit.com/product/258 which is about half that of most smartphones. At 24h there's a best case power budget

The module appears to be https://simcom.ee/modules/wcdma-hspa/sim5320/ hardware data at https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/SIM5320_Hardware_Design_...

... which claims a standby current of about 2.5ma. So either it's not correctly entering standby, or most of the power is going somewhere else. If the LED bargraph runs continuously that would explain it, but I assume she's thought of that and it's triggered by a button. Or doesn't mind the 24 hour battery life.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#55

Post by krilovsky »

clSTophEjUdRanu wrote: post #46
krilovsky wrote: post #6

Calling this open source is a bit of a stretch. At the heart of this phone there is a huge proprietary dependency (the Adafruit FONA module).

The problem with these open source phone projects is that all the modems use closed source drivers (I think). Do you know a path forward to do this entirely with open source?

Unfortunately I don't know of any project in the area of open source basebands. There was OsmocomBB for GSM, which used the TI Calypso chipset, but I'm not aware of any such efforts for 3G/4G.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#56

Post by userbinator »

bluGill wrote: post #49
enriquto wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On a slightly more practical note Why "more practical"? How is a desk phone more practical than a portable one?

They don't break - or at least they don't break under normal abuse. You can break them if you try hard enough, but your first try will probably fail.

...and when they do, they're very easily repaired --- at least the early, pre-electronics ones.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#57

Post by croon »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #14
jacknews wrote: post #10

Very cool! i concur with the whole functional simplicity thing. But I think the dial is anachronistic, despite what's claimed; A bit like fitting your car with reigns for steering and a whip for acceleration. The only 'functional' aspect of it is perhaps that it slows down your dialing enough (especially when your finger slips on a number, and you have to start over!), for you to think whether you really need to make…

It's fun, which is its own kind of "functional".

You could say it puts the fun in functional.

I'll see myself out.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#58

Post by Waterluvian »

DonHopkins wrote: post #50

The problem with the "retro" telephone ring sound that so many modern phones have built in is that it just doesn't resonate and echo and slowly decay over time like a real phone ring. It would be cool to code up a physical ring simulator that reproduces that sound properly, and responds to the accelerometer, especially when you drop it or hang up on somebody by slamming it down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXsIQ…

Not being able to slam hang up on someone is a critically missing feature and due to such, I believe the entire smartphone revolution is a failure.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#59

Post by croon »

JdeBP wrote: post #37
jamiethompson wrote: post #24

I use an unmodified rotary phone as my main landline phone. In the UK it would seem that our exchanges still support pulse dialling. The only drawback are menu systems that expect to hear tones, but I get around this with a small app on my mobile phone that just plays DTMF tones. If i want to, i can pick up the receiver and play tones down it to dial a number rather than using the... dial.

Hand-held DTMF tone generators, for exactly this purpose, were once fairly widespread. A financial institution once sent one to me for navigating its dial-up automated teller system.

And before that less widespread, but in circulation [eg 0] for "free" long distance phone calls.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#60

Post by DonHopkins »

Waterluvian wrote: post #58
DonHopkins wrote: post #50

The problem with the "retro" telephone ring sound that so many modern phones have built in is that it just doesn't resonate and echo and slowly decay over time like a real phone ring. It would be cool to code up a physical ring simulator that reproduces that sound properly, and responds to the accelerometer, especially when you drop it or hang up on somebody by slamming it down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXsIQ…

Not being able to slam hang up on someone is a critically missing feature and due to such, I believe the entire smartphone revolution is a failure.

The biggest problem with telephones that still persists even today, is that you can only hang up on somebody once. Anybody who can solve that problem is bound to revolutionize communication as we know it.
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