12 ms·

Rotary Cellphone

572 points by nallerooth 7y ago

rdevnull 7y ago
wow so cool :) take my money ! I want one
enriquto 7y ago
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.
- dmos62 7y ago
  There's a paper display on the back. This is amazing.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    The display takes next to no power when not changing. The problem here is potentially a software bug. The cellphone radio probably is not getting put to sleep as long as it could be, and that's about 100 mWh.
- taneq 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    The headlined article states that it was taken from 2 hours to 1 day already.
    - taneq 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        > 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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        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.
adrianN 7y ago
> 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.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  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.
- andrewcchen 7y ago
  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.
- rusticpenn 7y ago
  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).
- pjc50 7y ago
  The battery looks like it might be this one: https://www.adafruit.com/product/258 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/ https://simcom.ee/modules/wcdma-hspa/sim5320/ hardware data at https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/SIM5320_Hardware_Design_V1.07.pdf 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.
krilovsky 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    "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 7y ago
      It's very cool indeed, even if it was all closed source :)
  - krilovsky 7y ago
    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. [0] https://simcom.ee/modules/wcdma-hspa/sim5320/ https://simcom.ee/modules/wcdma-hspa/sim5320/
    - saalweachter 7y ago
      Boy howdy, you are not going to like to hear what happens when those radio signals leave your cellular telephone.
- taneq 7y ago
  It's hard to get any open source software finished, what with all the goat farming. (https://pics.me.me/i-thought-using-loops-was-cheating-so-programmed-my-own-12251946.png https://pics.me.me/i-thought-using-loops-was-cheating-so-pro...)
walrus01 7y ago
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-Telephone-Western-Electric-500DM-Works/174182582307?hash=item288e174823%3Ag%3AurkAAOSw%7EWpeOxjo%3Asc%3AUSPSPriorityFlatRateBox%2198230%21US%21-1&LH_BIN=1 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Black-Rotary-Phone-Telephon...
- enriquto 7y ago
  > On a slightly more practical note Why "more practical"? How is a desk phone more practical than a portable one?
  - walrus01 7y ago
    You can answer it for incoming calls like a normal office voip phone, without the need to worry about limited battery life or paying for a live SIM card just to have a toy to play around with. For people who already have their own SIP based IP PBX the cost of adding another phone is zero. For outbound calls if you encounter an IVR menu (press 1 for english, etc), the ATA will translate pulse dialing into DTMF tones. Functionality I think this example is lacking.
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    it becomes impossible (or at least rather challenging) to accidentally butt-dial somebody?
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    You can’t drop it in the toilet.
    - JdeBP 7y ago
      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. (-:
jacknews 7y ago
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.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  It's fun, which is its own kind of "functional".
  - croon 7y ago
    You could say it puts the fun in functional. I'll see myself out.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      That's a recursive portmanteau!
- JdeBP 7y ago
  The article makes no claim that it is not anachronistic. What it says, rather, is that that is not the point.
  - jacknews 7y ago
    True And I agree it's fun and a cool project, regardless of utility
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  I knew an early mobile phone adopter in the 80's who made a converter plug for his car phone, and plugged in an old black classical AT&T dial phone that he could make and receive calls on. Every time he drove over a bump with the car, the bell on the phone would ding.
daniel-dev 7y ago
i really like this, well done
mmhsieh 7y ago
how about a phone where you just have a clicker to put in the number in binary?
- maweki 7y ago
  or unary :D The firebrigade and police not even a thousand clicks away.
- JdeBP 7y ago
  Make it double as the hook, and you have just reinvented hookswitch dialling for the mobile telephone minded. (-:
xtiansimon 7y ago
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.“
ssfivy 7y ago
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
jamiethompson 7y ago
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.
- ssfivy 7y ago
  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?
  - jamiethompson 7y ago
    It's just a bit of fun. It's more ornamental than anything. It's just nice that it also works as a phone although I rarely ever actually use the landline.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    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...
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  You hold your mobile phone up to your rotary phone in order to play the tones? Why not just use the mobile phone to make the call?
  - jamiethompson 7y ago
    Well, I don't. I rarely use the landline. I'm just saying that you can if you want to.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    My mom refused to get touch-tone service, in the hopes of preventing me from becoming a phone phreak. But I had my touch-tone-enabled friends touch-tone me MCI codes and phone numbers I wanted to call over the phone, and recorded them on a cassette tape recorder, which I could then play back, with the cassette player's mic and speaker cable wired directly into the phone speaker and mic. Finally there was one long distance service that used speech recognition to dial numbers! It would repeat groups of 3 or 4 digits you spoke, and ask you to verify they were correct with yes or no. If you said no, it would speak each digit back and ask you to verify it: Was the first number 7? ... The most satisfying way I ever made a free phone call was at the expense of Bell Communications Research (who were up to their ears swimming in as much free phone service as they possibly could give away, so it didn't hurt anyone -- and it was actually with their explicitly spoken consent), and was due to in-band signaling of billing authorization: Peter Langston (working at Bellcore) created and wrote a classic 1985 Usenix paper about "Eedie & Eddie", whose phone number still rings a bell (in my head at least, since I called it so often): http://www.langston.com/ http://www.langston.com/ http://www.langston.com/Papers/ http://www.langston.com/Papers/ http://www.langston.com/Papers/2332.pdf http://www.langston.com/Papers/2332.pdf >(201) 644-2332 or Eedie & Eddie on the Wire: An Experiment in Music Generation. Peter S Langston. Bell communications Research, Morristown, New Jersey. >ABSTRACT: At Bell Communications Research a set of programs running on loosely coupled Unix systems equipped with unusual peripherals forms a setting in which ideas about music may be "aired". This paper describes the hardware and software components of a short automated music concert that is available through the public switched telephone network. Three methods of algorithmic music generation are described. Eedie & Eddie (And The Reggaebots) - Some Velvet Morning (Peter Langston) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0Ko1GUiSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0Ko1GUiSo http://www.wfmu.org/365/2003/169.shtml http://www.wfmu.org/365/2003/169.shtml >At the time I was also running a telephone demo that you could call up to hear samples of music composed for you while-u-wait by the computers in my lab. Most people called the mono telephone number that gave you a monophonic mix of the stereo channels, but you could also call either the left or right channel, or both, one phone on each ear, to get stereo -- this was how I worked from home. The elaborate phone connections were from the telephone switch in Brian Redman's lab. >When the call would come in, the computers in my lab would start composing the 6 or 7 pieces that were played in the demo, while a voice synthesizer in Brian's lab (Eedie) would accept the call (we paid the long distance on a few collect calls from music researchers in other parts of the world) and introduce the demo, explaining what was going to happen, then the call would be switched over to my lab where another voice synthesizer (Eddie) would take over, introducing each piece as it was played. >The idea for Eddie's voice came from the overly-happy shipboard computer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio serial. In the phone demo Eddie would say something like: >Hi! This is Eddie! Your computer music phone, FRIEND! >Oh BOY! You are rilly rilly going to like this music, I can TELL! >[pause] >First, I'll just make sure that Peter's computer is working, and then we can share-and-ENJOY! >This is pretty much the kind of thing that Douglas Adams' computer said, and he was named Eddie, so we used Eddie as an homage. Then, when we wanted the voice-synth that answers the phone in Brian's lab to be female, we considered how, later in the Hitchhiker's Guide, Zaphod Beeblebrox chooses a different personality module for the computer and gets a worried old lady's voice -- "This will all end in tears!" but Adams never gives her a name, so I chose "Edie" as a feminized "Eddie". Unfortunately, the DECtalk voice synthesizer we were using pronounced E-d-i-e just like E-d-d-i-e with a short E vowel "eh" at the start, so we had to spell her name E-e-d-i-e in order to get the long E initial vowel sound. >Anyway, the little chit-chat between Eedie and Eddie at the beginning of the recording of Some Velvet Morning is typical of the sillier moments in the phone demo introductions, and is included as an attempt to familiarize the listener with their strange accents. When you called (201) 644-2332, the Dectalk speech synthesizer would answer, say "Hi! This is Eddie! Your computer music phone, FRIEND!", wait a few seconds, then cheerfully and sincerely announce, "Yes, operator. I will accept the charges." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk LGR Oddware: $1,200 DECtalk PC Speech Synthesizer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPW2S4fZMJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPW2S4fZMJY Then Eddie would launch into his greeting and introduction to the phone tree of cool demos, like singing songs, telling jokes, generating improvisational music with L-systems or Stochastic Binary Subdivision, playing games, reading news summaries and weather reports, etc. But then some "music researcher in other parts of the world" realized that it was perfect for making operator assisted third party collect phone calls! Did you ever trick the phone company into cheerfully accepting the charges of a third party phone call? You will! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_assistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_assistance >A third number call or third party call is an operator assisted telephone call that can be billed to the party other than the calling and called party. The operator calls the third number for the party to accept the charges before the call can proceed. So you could just dial 0, tell the human operator that you want to call any number you wanted, and charge it to (201) 644-2332. Then they would call that Morristown, New Jersey number for authorization, Eddie would answer, the human would ask "Will you accept the charges for a collect call from ... to ...?", Eddie would then cheerfully announce, "Yes, operator, I will accept the charges!", and the human would say "thank you" and hang up on the loosely coupled network of Unix systems with unusual peripherals at Bell Labs, then connect you through for free to whoever in the world you wanted to talk with, for however long you want to talk, charging the call to Bellcore! "Share and enjoy!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wSBC5Dyds8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wSBC5Dyds8
StavrosK 7y ago
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 7y ago
  I dunno, I like the iRotary form factor. Both are impractical, and yours leans into the impracticality.
soliton4 7y ago
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
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  You could define a class called RingyDingyEnumerator! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffxVap-1L1Y 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3AujuB_3Zs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Tomlin 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw Ernestine's House Call - Saturday Night Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TbI_1XoJN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TbI_1XoJN0 Ernestine the telephone operator calls General Motors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT4__Nz5HWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT4__Nz5HWY Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the Telephone Operator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0l9fE2RAj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0l9fE2RAj8
- geocar 7y ago
  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
gandalfian 7y ago
Weird second time I've seen this this morning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22303956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22303956
bo0tzz 7y ago
Looks like this got hugged to death. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200211231236/http://justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200211231236/http://justine-ha...
ErotemeObelus 7y ago
Putting this on my todo list.
DonHopkins 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
    - itronitron 7y ago
      Yes, that is only slightly offset by being able to unfriend someone multiple times.
    - 3stadt 7y ago
      I feel you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhsyOMkk1Ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhsyOMkk1Ug
    - zentiggr 7y ago
      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...
timonoko 7y ago
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.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Thank you! Knowing that story is a great mnemonic to remember it, even if you have a push button phone!
  - troymc 7y ago
    I grew up in North America (where 911 is the emergency number), so when I moved to Germany and wanted to remember 112, I noticed that it spells out: 1 + 1 = 2
    - XaspR8d 7y ago
      That would foil me if it was my only memory device. A+B=C is true of ~55 (napkin math) different 3-digit numbers. Plus another 40-ish for A×B=C and 50-ish for A-B=C...
      - iNate2000 7y ago
        But it’s A+A=B
        LadyCailin 7y ago
        The good news is, there’s not that many of those. 112, 224, 336, 448, 550 (its a stretch), and you’re likely to start at the beginning, therefore getting it on the first try. Actually, I’ve heard that on cell phones in EU, you can still dial 911, and it’ll connect. I have had occasions to call 112 before, but it’s always been in big enough emergencies that I didn’t have time to experiment. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I come across an emergency that’s urgent enough to call 112, but not urgent enough that it can’t wait a little bit for me to try something. It’s a delicate balance
microcolonel 7y ago
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.
dopamean 7y ago
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.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Awesome, I will have to share that with my former colleagues from Martelsham.
npudar 7y ago
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-who-led-the-way-to-all-digit-dialing-dies-at-94.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/john-e-karlin-wh...
Aloha 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Maybe “uncomfortable to hold” is part of the point. This is basically an art project, after all.
leshokunin 7y ago
So how long until someone ports Doom to it?
rootbear 7y ago
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!
ogre_codes 7y ago
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.
drcongo 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
presspot 7y ago
I would totally fund this on Kickstarter.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
brian_herman__ 7y ago
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
Rantenki 7y ago
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/
nicbar 7y ago
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!
badrabbit 7y ago
She should put this up on a crowdfubd site like crowdsupply to mass manufacture. I for one would buy!
moisto 7y ago
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 :)

572 points by nallerooth 7y ago

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

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.

dmos62 7y ago
There's a paper display on the back. This is amazing.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  The display takes next to no power when not changing. The problem here is potentially a software bug. The cellphone radio probably is not getting put to sleep as long as it could be, and that's about 100 mWh.
taneq 7y ago
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 7y ago
  The headlined article states that it was taken from 2 hours to 1 day already.
  - taneq 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        > 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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        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.

adrianN 7y ago

> 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.

_-___________-_ 7y ago
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.
andrewcchen 7y ago
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.
rusticpenn 7y ago
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).
pjc50 7y ago
The battery looks like it might be this one: https://www.adafruit.com/product/258 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/ https://simcom.ee/modules/wcdma-hspa/sim5320/ hardware data at https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/SIM5320_Hardware_Design_V1.07.pdf 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.

krilovsky 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  "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 7y ago
    It's very cool indeed, even if it was all closed source :)
- krilovsky 7y ago
  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. [0] https://simcom.ee/modules/wcdma-hspa/sim5320/ https://simcom.ee/modules/wcdma-hspa/sim5320/
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    Boy howdy, you are not going to like to hear what happens when those radio signals leave your cellular telephone.
taneq 7y ago
It's hard to get any open source software finished, what with all the goat farming. (https://pics.me.me/i-thought-using-loops-was-cheating-so-programmed-my-own-12251946.png https://pics.me.me/i-thought-using-loops-was-cheating-so-pro...)

walrus01 7y ago

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

enriquto 7y ago
> On a slightly more practical note Why "more practical"? How is a desk phone more practical than a portable one?
- walrus01 7y ago
  You can answer it for incoming calls like a normal office voip phone, without the need to worry about limited battery life or paying for a live SIM card just to have a toy to play around with. For people who already have their own SIP based IP PBX the cost of adding another phone is zero. For outbound calls if you encounter an IVR menu (press 1 for english, etc), the ATA will translate pulse dialing into DTMF tones. Functionality I think this example is lacking.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  it becomes impossible (or at least rather challenging) to accidentally butt-dial somebody?
- Koshkin 7y ago
  You can’t drop it in the toilet.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    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. (-:

jacknews 7y ago

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.

_-___________-_ 7y ago
It's fun, which is its own kind of "functional".
- croon 7y ago
  You could say it puts the fun in functional. I'll see myself out.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    That's a recursive portmanteau!
JdeBP 7y ago
The article makes no claim that it is not anachronistic. What it says, rather, is that that is not the point.
- jacknews 7y ago
  True And I agree it's fun and a cool project, regardless of utility
DonHopkins 7y ago
I knew an early mobile phone adopter in the 80's who made a converter plug for his car phone, and plugged in an old black classical AT&T dial phone that he could make and receive calls on. Every time he drove over a bump with the car, the bell on the phone would ding.

daniel-dev 7y ago

i really like this, well done

mmhsieh 7y ago

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

maweki 7y ago
or unary :D The firebrigade and police not even a thousand clicks away.
JdeBP 7y ago
Make it double as the hook, and you have just reinvented hookswitch dialling for the mobile telephone minded. (-:

xtiansimon 7y ago

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.“

ssfivy 7y ago

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

jamiethompson 7y ago

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.

ssfivy 7y ago
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?
- jamiethompson 7y ago
  It's just a bit of fun. It's more ornamental than anything. It's just nice that it also works as a phone although I rarely ever actually use the landline.
- bluGill 7y ago
  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...
chrisseaton 7y ago
You hold your mobile phone up to your rotary phone in order to play the tones? Why not just use the mobile phone to make the call?
- jamiethompson 7y ago
  Well, I don't. I rarely use the landline. I'm just saying that you can if you want to.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  My mom refused to get touch-tone service, in the hopes of preventing me from becoming a phone phreak. But I had my touch-tone-enabled friends touch-tone me MCI codes and phone numbers I wanted to call over the phone, and recorded them on a cassette tape recorder, which I could then play back, with the cassette player's mic and speaker cable wired directly into the phone speaker and mic. Finally there was one long distance service that used speech recognition to dial numbers! It would repeat groups of 3 or 4 digits you spoke, and ask you to verify they were correct with yes or no. If you said no, it would speak each digit back and ask you to verify it: Was the first number 7? ... The most satisfying way I ever made a free phone call was at the expense of Bell Communications Research (who were up to their ears swimming in as much free phone service as they possibly could give away, so it didn't hurt anyone -- and it was actually with their explicitly spoken consent), and was due to in-band signaling of billing authorization: Peter Langston (working at Bellcore) created and wrote a classic 1985 Usenix paper about "Eedie & Eddie", whose phone number still rings a bell (in my head at least, since I called it so often): http://www.langston.com/ http://www.langston.com/ http://www.langston.com/Papers/ http://www.langston.com/Papers/ http://www.langston.com/Papers/2332.pdf http://www.langston.com/Papers/2332.pdf >(201) 644-2332 or Eedie & Eddie on the Wire: An Experiment in Music Generation. Peter S Langston. Bell communications Research, Morristown, New Jersey. >ABSTRACT: At Bell Communications Research a set of programs running on loosely coupled Unix systems equipped with unusual peripherals forms a setting in which ideas about music may be "aired". This paper describes the hardware and software components of a short automated music concert that is available through the public switched telephone network. Three methods of algorithmic music generation are described. Eedie & Eddie (And The Reggaebots) - Some Velvet Morning (Peter Langston) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0Ko1GUiSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0Ko1GUiSo http://www.wfmu.org/365/2003/169.shtml http://www.wfmu.org/365/2003/169.shtml >At the time I was also running a telephone demo that you could call up to hear samples of music composed for you while-u-wait by the computers in my lab. Most people called the mono telephone number that gave you a monophonic mix of the stereo channels, but you could also call either the left or right channel, or both, one phone on each ear, to get stereo -- this was how I worked from home. The elaborate phone connections were from the telephone switch in Brian Redman's lab. >When the call would come in, the computers in my lab would start composing the 6 or 7 pieces that were played in the demo, while a voice synthesizer in Brian's lab (Eedie) would accept the call (we paid the long distance on a few collect calls from music researchers in other parts of the world) and introduce the demo, explaining what was going to happen, then the call would be switched over to my lab where another voice synthesizer (Eddie) would take over, introducing each piece as it was played. >The idea for Eddie's voice came from the overly-happy shipboard computer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio serial. In the phone demo Eddie would say something like: >Hi! This is Eddie! Your computer music phone, FRIEND! >Oh BOY! You are rilly rilly going to like this music, I can TELL! >[pause] >First, I'll just make sure that Peter's computer is working, and then we can share-and-ENJOY! >This is pretty much the kind of thing that Douglas Adams' computer said, and he was named Eddie, so we used Eddie as an homage. Then, when we wanted the voice-synth that answers the phone in Brian's lab to be female, we considered how, later in the Hitchhiker's Guide, Zaphod Beeblebrox chooses a different personality module for the computer and gets a worried old lady's voice -- "This will all end in tears!" but Adams never gives her a name, so I chose "Edie" as a feminized "Eddie". Unfortunately, the DECtalk voice synthesizer we were using pronounced E-d-i-e just like E-d-d-i-e with a short E vowel "eh" at the start, so we had to spell her name E-e-d-i-e in order to get the long E initial vowel sound. >Anyway, the little chit-chat between Eedie and Eddie at the beginning of the recording of Some Velvet Morning is typical of the sillier moments in the phone demo introductions, and is included as an attempt to familiarize the listener with their strange accents. When you called (201) 644-2332, the Dectalk speech synthesizer would answer, say "Hi! This is Eddie! Your computer music phone, FRIEND!", wait a few seconds, then cheerfully and sincerely announce, "Yes, operator. I will accept the charges." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk LGR Oddware: $1,200 DECtalk PC Speech Synthesizer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPW2S4fZMJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPW2S4fZMJY Then Eddie would launch into his greeting and introduction to the phone tree of cool demos, like singing songs, telling jokes, generating improvisational music with L-systems or Stochastic Binary Subdivision, playing games, reading news summaries and weather reports, etc. But then some "music researcher in other parts of the world" realized that it was perfect for making operator assisted third party collect phone calls! Did you ever trick the phone company into cheerfully accepting the charges of a third party phone call? You will! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_assistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_assistance >A third number call or third party call is an operator assisted telephone call that can be billed to the party other than the calling and called party. The operator calls the third number for the party to accept the charges before the call can proceed. So you could just dial 0, tell the human operator that you want to call any number you wanted, and charge it to (201) 644-2332. Then they would call that Morristown, New Jersey number for authorization, Eddie would answer, the human would ask "Will you accept the charges for a collect call from ... to ...?", Eddie would then cheerfully announce, "Yes, operator, I will accept the charges!", and the human would say "thank you" and hang up on the loosely coupled network of Unix systems with unusual peripherals at Bell Labs, then connect you through for free to whoever in the world you wanted to talk with, for however long you want to talk, charging the call to Bellcore! "Share and enjoy!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wSBC5Dyds8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wSBC5Dyds8

StavrosK 7y ago

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 7y ago
I dunno, I like the iRotary form factor. Both are impractical, and yours leans into the impracticality.

soliton4 7y ago

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

DonHopkins 7y ago
You could define a class called RingyDingyEnumerator! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffxVap-1L1Y 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3AujuB_3Zs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Tomlin 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw Ernestine's House Call - Saturday Night Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TbI_1XoJN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TbI_1XoJN0 Ernestine the telephone operator calls General Motors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT4__Nz5HWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT4__Nz5HWY Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the Telephone Operator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0l9fE2RAj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0l9fE2RAj8
geocar 7y ago
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

gandalfian 7y ago

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

bo0tzz 7y ago

Looks like this got hugged to death. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200211231236/http://justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200211231236/http://justine-ha...

ErotemeObelus 7y ago

Putting this on my todo list.

DonHopkins 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    Yes, that is only slightly offset by being able to unfriend someone multiple times.
  - 3stadt 7y ago
    I feel you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhsyOMkk1Ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhsyOMkk1Ug
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    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...

timonoko 7y ago

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.

DonHopkins 7y ago
Thank you! Knowing that story is a great mnemonic to remember it, even if you have a push button phone!
- troymc 7y ago
  I grew up in North America (where 911 is the emergency number), so when I moved to Germany and wanted to remember 112, I noticed that it spells out: 1 + 1 = 2
  - XaspR8d 7y ago
    That would foil me if it was my only memory device. A+B=C is true of ~55 (napkin math) different 3-digit numbers. Plus another 40-ish for A×B=C and 50-ish for A-B=C...
    - iNate2000 7y ago
      But it’s A+A=B
      - LadyCailin 7y ago
        The good news is, there’s not that many of those. 112, 224, 336, 448, 550 (its a stretch), and you’re likely to start at the beginning, therefore getting it on the first try. Actually, I’ve heard that on cell phones in EU, you can still dial 911, and it’ll connect. I have had occasions to call 112 before, but it’s always been in big enough emergencies that I didn’t have time to experiment. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I come across an emergency that’s urgent enough to call 112, but not urgent enough that it can’t wait a little bit for me to try something. It’s a delicate balance

microcolonel 7y ago

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.

dopamean 7y ago

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.

C1sc0cat 7y ago

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

npudar 7y ago

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

Aloha 7y ago

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 7y ago
Maybe “uncomfortable to hold” is part of the point. This is basically an art project, after all.

leshokunin 7y ago

So how long until someone ports Doom to it?

rootbear 7y ago

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!

ogre_codes 7y ago

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.

drcongo 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

presspot 7y ago

I would totally fund this on Kickstarter.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

brian_herman__ 7y ago

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

Rantenki 7y ago

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/

nicbar 7y ago

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!

badrabbit 7y ago

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

moisto 7y ago

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 :)