
Rotary Cellphone - nallerooth
http://justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/
======
bo0tzz
Looks like this got hugged to death. Archive link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200211231236/http://justine-
ha...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200211231236/http://justine-
haupt.com/rotarycellphone/)

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timonoko
European Union recommended emergency number is "112". Because you can morse it
with the hook or even by short-circuitin the wires. This is also why the
pulse-dialing receiver is operational in most EU countries.

~~~
kees99
Why not 111? That would have been even easier to manually-pulse dial.

~~~
Angostura
In the good old days, they looked at 111 at an emergency number but it was
rejected because it was too easy for the digit 1 to be tapped out by in high
winds by wires rubbing together.

That's why the UK went with 999 as something memorable, but slow to dial.

~~~
rbanffy
AFAIK they changed it to 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.

Sorry. Someone had to.

~~~
peterleiser
Try calling that number on your Android phone. It still "works" on my
Essential phone with stock Android 10.

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DonHopkins
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=AxXsIQDafog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXsIQDafog)

~~~
Waterluvian
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.

~~~
DonHopkins
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.

~~~
zentiggr
Imagine that there was a phone receiver that delivered a zero to nominally
painful electric current based on how abruptly the audio from the other
speaker cut off... All sorts of reasons that this isn't doable, but the
psychological satisfaction of knowing that spam caller just got zapped...

~~~
DonHopkins
I'd love for Simone Giertz to design a crappy robot Hang Up Machine phone
receiver, as effective as her Wake Up Machine alarm clock!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbjV7TUSIHs&t=3m36s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbjV7TUSIHs&t=3m36s)

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ssfivy
For those interested, here's a Sparkfun project from 2005 on converting an
actual rotary phone into a portable cellular phone:

[https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/51](https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/51)

You used to be able to buy them too:
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/286](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/286)

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adrianN
> 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.

~~~
rusticpenn
Most performance optimizations take more time to implement than the actual
goals. Hobby projects focus on fun proof of concepts, performance
optimizations are ot very attractive (unless optimization itself is the goal).

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walrus01
On 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...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Black-Rotary-Phone-Telephone-
Western-Electric-500DM-
Works/174182582307?hash=item288e174823%3Ag%3AurkAAOSw%7EWpeOxjo%3Asc%3AUSPSPriorityFlatRateBox%2198230%21US%21-1&LH_BIN=1)

~~~
enriquto
> On a slightly more practical note

Why "more practical"? How is a desk phone more practical than a portable one?

~~~
Koshkin
You can’t drop it in the toilet.

~~~
JdeBP
In the days of wired handsets with really long cables, you'd be surprised at
what could happen to the handsets, and where people took telephone calls. (-:

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jacknews
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 that call.

~~~
JdeBP
The article makes no claim that it is not anachronistic. What it says, rather,
is that _that is not the point_.

~~~
jacknews
True

And I agree it's fun and a cool project, regardless of utility

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brian_herman__
I want all of these features in a phone without the rotary part:

* Real, removable antenna with an SMA connector. Receptions is excellent, and if I really want to I could always attach a directional antenna.

* When I want a phone I don't have to navigate through menus to get to the phone "application". That's bullshit.

* If I want to call my husband, I can do so by pressing a single dedicated physical key which is dediated to him. No menus. The point isn't to use the rotary dial every single time I want to make a call, which would get tiresome for daily use. The people I call most often are stored, and if I have to dial a new number, or do something like set the volume, then I can use the fun and satisfying-to-use rotary dial.

* Nearlt instantaneous, high resolution of signal strength and battery level. No signal metering lag, and my LED bargraph gives 10 increments of resolution instead of just 4.

* The ePaper display is bistatic, meaning it doesn't take any energy to display a fixed message.

* When I want to change something about the phones behavior, I just do it.

* The power switch is an actual slide switch. No holding down a stupid button to make it turn off and not being sure it really is turning off or what.

edit:formatting

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jamiethompson
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.

~~~
JdeBP
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.

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

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

~~~
jagged-chisel
You didn’t insinuate this, but to be clear, a blue box didn’t emit “touch
tones.”

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StavrosK
This is great, I especially love the form factor. I did the same a few years
ago but kept the original enclosure:

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-
saga/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/)

It was a very fun project and I learned a lot about electronics doing it!

~~~
JshWright
I dunno, I like the iRotary form factor. Both are impractical, and yours leans
into the impracticality.

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soliton4
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

~~~
geocar
I did something like this as a joke at a company I used to work for. Asterisk,
a lot of wacky perl, and CMUSphinx. You'd pick up one of the rotary phones in
the office[1] and say "operator", wait for a chirp, then you could either
speak the number or say the persons name you wanted to call.

[1]: [https://i.imgur.com/O7GLfsa.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/O7GLfsa.jpg)

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xtiansimon
Brilliant!

And this is a gem if there ever was one: “The point isn't to use the rotary
dial every single time I want to make a call, which would get tiresome for
daily use.“

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dopamean
when I started visiting this site almost 8 years ago this was the kind of
content I wanted (and expected) to see more of. tbh it's been a little
disappointing how silicon valley tech industry everything has been focused.

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drcongo
I don't understand how one would dial a 1 on that dial. There doesn't seem to
be any room for it to travel.

~~~
wolfpwner
I'm thinking of the same thing, looking at the pictures of old phones, there
should be space reserved between the "1" hole and the metal stopper.

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enriquto
This 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.

~~~
taneq
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.

~~~
JdeBP
The headlined article states that it was taken from 2 hours to 1 day already.

~~~
taneq
Yeah, but that's from "first somewhat functional prototype" which probably
didn't make any special effort to conserve power, to "rev A" which I'd guess
does all the obvious things and is all you're going to get without significant
effort. You don't get "several weeks" out of a phone without some wizardry or
a humungous battery.

~~~
dwild
On my first Android smartphone, an LG Optimus One P500, I had no trouble to
reach 4-5 days and the battery was far from humungous, only 1500 mAh. Most
things were not running but I was using it to text quite often during the day.
I don't believe there was any wizardry on there.

We see the battery on a picture, if it comes from Adafruit, that seems like
the 2500mAh one they sell. There's no reasons that thing can't last at least a
week, but I can understands it wasn't the goal at all to make it last, so
almost no effort was invested in that.

~~~
jfim
> I don't believe there was any wizardry on there.

A lot of that wizardry is not really user-visible. Ensuring that chips spend
more time in sleep mode, coalescing events so that wakeups happen together,
ensuring that there are no components passively draining power, etc.

~~~
dwild
For me, wizardry would be to go beyond what any other manufacturer would do.
No one is considering Android phones to be optimizing specifically toward
battery life and that phone was the cheapest of the cheapest, I paid 50$ for
it, without any contract in 2012.

~~~
taneq
World's pretty big. A one-in-a-million engineer is pretty damn special
compared to the rest of us, and there's 7000 of them out there. Cheap-per-unit
hardware can have paradoxically high development budgets since volume is
expected to be so high. We probably all have slightly unrealistic how hard it
is to design even a "crap" piece of equipment.

It's like how non-software people can't fathom that it costs $50k to build a
relatively simple phone app when MS Office only costs a couple of hundred
bucks.

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ogre_codes
Given the choice I'd much prefer a device which texts but doesn't have a
"phone" than the reverse. The idea of a phone which doesn't text just sounds
frustrating.

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moisto
That is awesome. I remember dialing our beige rotary phone for my friend when
he came over after school... Haha he was afraid to dial it for about a year.

(Scared of looking dumb, I guess) But aside from choking on our tears and
those shameless bellyaches, we didn't give him any grief. This would have been
probably 1994 - 2000... when my folks upgraded to touch tone and answering
machine :)

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npudar
This would be a great time to see this obituary of John Karlin, one of the
early phone UX pioneers:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/john-e-karlin-
wh...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/john-e-karlin-who-led-the-
way-to-all-digit-dialing-dies-at-94.html)

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Rantenki
The link for the design files in the story is broken, but the files are up at
this link instead:

[http://justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/designfiles/](http://justine-
haupt.com/rotarycellphone/designfiles/)

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rootbear
Justine and I have a mutual friend. I sent him this link and he talked to her
and she said she's been overwhelmed by the attention it's getting. I saw it on
the Adafruit blog and I'm wondering if that's what started the avalanche.

It's cool project!

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gandalfian
Weird second time I've seen this this morning.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22303956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22303956)

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Aloha
What I dont understand is why they just didnt use the trimline case as the
case for the thing - or at least the blueprint for the case - this thing looks
uncomfortable to hold for any length of time.

~~~
pmiller2
Maybe “uncomfortable to hold” is part of the point. This is basically an art
project, after all.

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microcolonel
I'd personally do it with the whole enclosure and handset intact. You could
fit a pretty decent battery in there... to operate the bell.

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leshokunin
So how long until someone ports Doom to it?

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badrabbit
She should put this up on a crowdfubd site like crowdsupply to mass
manufacture. I for one would buy!

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C1sc0cat
Awesome, I will have to share that with my former colleagues from Martelsham.

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nicbar
24hrs battery?!?! For a low tech solution with no draining high res
touchscreen and all the other battery hungry features of a modern smartphone
this is shockingly poor. I thought it was going to be 2 weeks!

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presspot
I would totally fund this on Kickstarter.

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mmhsieh
how about a phone where you just have a clicker to put in the number in
binary?

~~~
JdeBP
Make it double as the hook, and you have just reinvented hookswitch dialling
for the mobile telephone minded. (-:

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rdevnull
wow so cool :) take my money ! I want one

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daniel-dev
i really like this, well done

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krilovsky
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).

~~~
fsh
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!

~~~
krilovsky
It's very cool indeed, even if it was all closed source :)

