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RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

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11–20 of 54 posts

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wouldn't want my child making unencrypted calls :p

Doesn't this project go straight into modern standard mobile phone systems? It'll be encrypted then.

I think he might have been calling into question the wisdom of using the standard telephone network to directly place voice calls. Technically it's encrypted but your privacy is anything but guaranteed.

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#12
For the 21700 cell if you want to do this without spending a lot on batteries, but also be sure that any misconfigured hardware can't drain the battery below a damage threshold, use a button top protected 21700 cell. Here's a good 'house brand' one that is popular with 21700 flashlights.

https://liionwholesale.com/collections/batteries/products/pr...

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#13
post #6

When I finally agree to cave in and buy a phone for my soon-to-be teenager, little does she know this is the phone I have in mind…

i wouldn't want my child making unencrypted calls :p

It's no more or less encrypted than any cellular phone making a call across your local 3GPP-whatever standard network.

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#14
Accepting 5V over the RJ-11 jack seems asking for trouble. Someone is going to plug it into a regular phone socket at some point, so it needs to be capable of surviving at least 60VAC. Even if a secondary pair is used, there are so many different wiring standards in use, it'll end up plugged into something live sooner or later.

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#15
We have a similarly converted rotary phone at my local astronomy club's observatory, used to receive visitors. It's driven by an arduino if I remember correctly. The main issue is that the sound quality of its built-in speaker is quite poor, especially compared to modern cell phone speakers we're used to nowadays, with a narrow frequency window and frequent echoes.

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#16

For the 21700 cell if you want to do this without spending a lot on batteries, but also be sure that any misconfigured hardware can't drain the battery below a damage threshold, use a button top protected 21700 cell. Here's a good 'house brand' one that is popular with 21700 flashlights. https://liionwholesale.com/collections/batteries/products/pr...

Mmmmmmmmmmhhh. Maybe better to damage A battery than to have a drone fall out of the sky? Also most protected cells have modest current capabilities, and might not be enough for many drone applications.

By its nature, MUAVs tend to push batteries to their limits and lifecycles tend to be limited. A battery that does mission X must have a maximum weight and a minimum capacity, and a minimum current spec. If you increase the life cycles, you decrease the maximum performance (range, payload, etc).

When you get into bigger drones, more modest restrictions on mission capability give acceptable tradeoffs, but for MUAVs short cycle life is often seen as an acceptable cost.

Frequently , after a hundred (or often much less) cycles in a MUAV a battery is retired from stressful missions due to significant drops in capability. It’s still fine for other uses, but at 90% it’s no longer sufficient for frontier MUAV applications.

The best choice to keep drones from falling out of the sky is to make sure that your auto land is set to a reasonable battery level (calibration by height if you will be at altitude) and use cell cutoffs at or below the minimum safe voltage if at all. (They are usually set to a few tenths of a volt above the minimum safe, often as much as 500mV.) The final battery voltage should be managed manually and batteries tested if over-discharged.

At least, that’s what prevents the most hardware from falling out of the sky onto people’s heads, sometimes bursting into flame on impact. Usually that is seen as the least desirable outcomes of a battery stress situation.

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#17
post #16

For the 21700 cell if you want to do this without spending a lot on batteries, but also be sure that any misconfigured hardware can't drain the battery below a damage threshold, use a button top protected 21700 cell. Here's a good 'house brand' one that is popular with 21700 flashlights. https://liionwholesale.com/collections/batteries/products/pr...

Mmmmmmmmmmhhh. Maybe better to damage A battery than to have a drone fall out of the sky? Also most protected cells have modest current capabilities, and might not be enough for many drone applications. By its nature, MUAVs tend to push batteries to their limits and lifecycles tend to be limited. A battery that does mission X must have a maximum weight and a minimum capacity, and a minimum current spec. If you increa…

So I was referring specifically to this phone hardware project and to flashlights, which don't fly... But my thoughts on drones are also that it's very different if you're building consumer class things that are meant to be re-used or what's going on in ukraine right now. They're using high amp rate cylidrical 18650 and 21700 cells in 6S2P and 6S3P packs for one way trip munition drones where you don't particularly care if you damage the li ion cells for any future re-use. In which case in the last few minutes of flight you can abuse the hell out of them with high amperage draw down to 2.5V (but beware of extreme voltage sag at the bottom end) and never have to worry.

If we're talking about something that's designed to be re-used then a totally different set of design considerations, as you outline above, become applicable.

> Frequently , after a hundred (or often much less) cycles in a MUAV a battery is retired from stressful missions

Are you talking about lipo pouch cells or li-ion cylindrical? Because if we're talking about state of the art high amp draw rated li ion cylindrical cells, 100 cycles on something that isn't heavily abused for heat and doesn't go below 15% state of charge should not significantly affect its lifespan. But if the batteries are being abused or every last bit of margin on range/payload is needed that it calls for almost "factory fresh" cells, or there's just absurd amounts of DoD money to throw at buying new battery packs, sure, I guess.

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#18

Accepting 5V over the RJ-11 jack seems asking for trouble. Someone is going to plug it into a regular phone socket at some point, so it needs to be capable of surviving at least 60VAC. Even if a secondary pair is used, there are so many different wiring standards in use, it'll end up plugged into something live sooner or later.

Dunno about you but I don't know anyone with live RJ-11 jacks in their house anymore.

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#19
post #15

We have a similarly converted rotary phone at my local astronomy club's observatory, used to receive visitors. It's driven by an arduino if I remember correctly. The main issue is that the sound quality of its built-in speaker is quite poor, especially compared to modern cell phone speakers we're used to nowadays, with a narrow frequency window and frequent echoes.

I've seen projects that swap out the rotary phone speaker with a speaker from a pair of on-ear headphones.

The Secret Life of Machines TV show has a fun demo of how the speakers in old telephones produce sound https://youtu.be/MCgCSMq5Xpo?si=CT5aOGttBpPk9tEM&t=458

Re: RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

#20

I remember someone building this (couple of years ago) https://skysedge.com/telecom/RUSP/index.html I so wish this was an actual product.

There's a lot of hardware out there that does 95% of what OP's does, though you'll pay a pretty penny for it (e.g. https://www.peplink.com/products/cellular-modems-adapters/po... ) though ther's been a flood of them from noname sellers on Aliexpress and eBay under the banner of "LTE Landline Converters"
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