I NEED a rotary dial as a fidget toy.
eBay's got plenty of them. With or without the phone.
Rotary Keyboard
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#42Rotary phones where used with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch - so they have very simple interface - just generate the number of pulses that is either N or 10-N (I don't remember exactly which one is right). There is also a nice back-story about how it was invented. This is a nice DIY project, but its practicality is questionable. Choosing a number on rotary phones is very slow, as you need to wait til…
You could redesign the rotary dial to return to zero much, much faster with shorter pulses and smaller intervals between them given advances in high frequency signal counting.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#43Part of me had hoped that this was some sort of insane mechanical keyboard, where every single key was on the rotary.
That's been done:
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#44Part of me had hoped that this was some sort of insane mechanical keyboard, where every single key was on the rotary.
That's been done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
"Everything is just a few hundred clicks away"
I am glad you shared the video because it was exactly what I thought of when I read the parent comment.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#45Apple had wheel keyboard https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#46This is so cool, especially for those of us who've used rotary phones. I'd like to see a video of a google voice or other call made using the rotary number pad :)
Just use a rotary cell phone: https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html
Tangent, does anyone know where can I buy a small mechanical ringer module like that? I'm probably feeding the wrong terms into ebay but the best it can do vintage doorbells.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#47The most interesting for is the USB 3.0 connection, on the hub. Didn't know the lanes are totally independent.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#48That's awesome. Given the effort that went into it, it's kind of a shame to use a cheap $10 board as a base. I think it'd be worthwhile to spend a bit more and get a keyboard running QMK, which also saves the headache of jerry-rigging an Arduino to control the thing and the complications that come with it (USB, custom logic in the firmware, etc).
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#49Re: Rotary Keyboard
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's see, for 104 keys 3/4" wide, the fully-rotary keyboard would have a circumference of 78" and a diameter of ~25". At that size, it should probably be oriented like a steering wheel.
The holes on my rotary phone are about 1 cm. One can make them nested, since it would have to be custom anyway: starting with the diameter of, say, 3 cm, adding a bit more than 1 cm on each side (3 cm, 4.5 cm, etc), and assuming that at least floor (pi * (1.5 + 2.5 * n - 2) / 1.5) keys fit in the nth such nested ring (1.5 + 2.5 * n is the outer diameter, - 2 is there since the holes won't be on the outer diameter, /…
If there are nested rings of keys, how would the keyboard know which key you "pressed"? Maybe I need to RTFM.