i really like this, well done
Rotary Cellphone
11–20 of 172 posts
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#12Calling 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).
This module is basically just a 3G baseband chip on a board. By your definition, no circuit that contains a chip would be open source.
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#13On a slightly more practical note, if you want a rotary VoIP desk phone, there's a few models of Grandstream ATAs that understand pulse dialing. They can be registered to Asterisk as normal SIP clients. $20 for the ATA plus $20 for the phone, plus your time to do the software configuration. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Black-Rotary-Phone-Telephon...
> On a slightly more practical note Why "more practical"? How is a desk phone more practical than a portable one?
it becomes impossible (or at least rather challenging) to accidentally butt-dial somebody?
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#14Very 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".
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#15> 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.
Assuming it has a comparable-size battery to other "feature phones", I suspect this could get better battery life with a bit of time spent on making sure everything goes to sleep whenever possible.
Having said that, hitting "more than a day of usage" is crucial, anything more than that is much less important for most users.
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#16Calling 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).
This module is basically just a 3G baseband chip on a board. By your definition, no circuit that contains a chip would be open source.
"just a 3G baseband chip" does hide an enormous amount of complexity. The point is just that this design contains both non-open-source hardware and non-open-source software (running on the 3G baseband chip). It's still mighty cool!
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#17Calling 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).
This module is basically just a 3G baseband chip on a board. By your definition, no circuit that contains a chip would be open source.
Except it's not "just" a 3G baseband chip. That chip[0] runs a closed source software that even contains a Lua interpreter. That's a proprietary binary blob that I don't know what it does, so this is not something that I would call "open source" even if the controller is open source.
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
This module is basically just a 3G baseband chip on a board. By your definition, no circuit that contains a chip would be open source.
"just a 3G baseband chip" does hide an enormous amount of complexity. The point is just that this design contains both non-open-source hardware and non-open-source software (running on the 3G baseband chip). It's still mighty cool!
It's very cool indeed, even if it was all closed source :)
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#19This is seriously cool! The device has an amazing set of features and functionality. I am a bit surprised about the short battery time. I would expect that, without a display, the battery would last several weeks under normal usage.
I don't see it listing the battery capacity anywhere so it might not be very big. Also, proper power saving design is a bit more complicated than you might think, it takes a lot of careful attention to detail to take a mobile device from hours to days of battery life.
Re: Rotary Cellphone
#20> 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.
It takes a combination of software and hardware to get good power consumption. In this case, assuming the author has implemented sleep modes on the microcontroller, it's probably the 3g module being not very power efficient.