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Show HN: Mum's 80th birthday present- a rotary phone from the 1970's
- scanman1 5y agoI have a pulse princess phone on the kitchen wall that is still working and is attached to the original Motorola VT-1005 ATA that Vontage provided when they first started in 1995. I have had this unit in continuous use and it receives pulse dialing as well as provides a very robust ring voltage/current. The web interface for this ATA does not allow configuration settings and the unit attempts to retrieve an FTP configuration file on boot from the provider. Someone on dslreports.com years ago reverse engenered and worked out the format of the config. file and created a config file creator program as well as a serial script to hook to its TTL serial port to change the address of the TFTP server. I now have it providing two analog lines from voip.ms that have a strong enough REN to power several old analog phones with real bells in the house. It even allows you to pulse dial class five codes like disable call waiting and call voice mail. EX. 1,1,6,9 = *69 if touch tone dialing.
- gus_massa 5y agoDo you have any photos of the inside, and how you replaced the parts? I think some additional technical details and photos may help to get traction here.
- stavros 5y agoNot the OP, but I have some from when I turned mine into a mobile phone: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/
- msafhyfsef 5y ago> all numbers in Greece are ten digits long, except for phone sex lines, for which the code would be added later. Phone sex numbers are treated specially in Greece?
- dotancohen 5y ago> Phone sex numbers are treated specially in Greece? Yes. In Greece, you look at the back of the head of the person you're having sex with. Thus talking during sex - or phone sex - is just plain weird.
- andrewstuart 5y agoIn response to your request I have put a more detailed comment in this thread.
- gus_massa 5y agoNice follow up! :) I read it yesterday a few minutes after you posted it.
- wonderwonder 5y agoThat's pretty great. Well done, I'm sure your mom is going to be thrilled. I'm always amazed at what people are able to build when they set their minds to it
- abalaji 5y agoThis is such a thoughtful idea--I'm sure she really enjoyed it. I'll bet there are some people who would enjoy being able to buy a "modern" rotary phone for purely aesthetic reasons.
- SquareWheel 5y agoI've looked many times! I always enjoyed using rotary phones, and I'd love to see a modern version that supports today's features like caller ID. I've seen a few, but they're often "luxury" models with exorbitant prices.
- dzmien 5y agoI am reminded of the woman who crafted a "dumb" cell phone with a rotary dialer: https://www.justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/ https://www.justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/
- loonster 5y agoAny plans to make the phone work?
- andrewstuart 5y agoThere were lots of ideas that I had but making the phone work as a real phone wasn't one of them!
- dwighttk 5y agoI remember when my grandparents’ phone company did some sort of upgrade in the 90s that forced them to use a touch tone phone. They returned the rotary phone they had been renting from the telephone company since sometime in the 50s.
- rubidium 5y agoThis is great. I love how the write up didn’t go into technical details (“a computer”) but focused on the important part. But I do want to know to know the technical details…. :)
- tartoran 5y agoI grew up on rotary phones in the 80s. Though I havent touched one in over 30 years, I still remember the distinctive feel of the rotary dial, it certainly had its own character but it was quite tedious to call another number, especially a number with high digits. In the 90s they were removed from my area but they were still touch dials translated to pulses. It felt a lot more modern but it would still take longer to dial high digits. I remember having a repertoire of 40-50 phone numbers that I had commited to memory. I still remember a few which I still use now in passwords:)
- sokoloff 5y agoI recall as a kid thinking it seemed ridiculous for there to be a specific monthly surcharge to allow TouchTone dialing. (I also learned that you could drop the service and TouchTone dialing would still work, so it really felt like they were just taking money from people too ill-informed to make a good decision.)
- salamandersauce 5y agoIt was ridiculous. I learned from 2600 that apparently telcos needed to upgrade their switches (or some other thing) just to be able to distinguish who had touch tone phone service from rotary.
- function_seven 5y agoI remember when I heard the rationale¹ for the assignments of area codes in North America: Populated areas with a high subscriber count would get the lowest codes to reduce the number of pulses required. Hence 212 for New York, 213 for Los Angeles, and 312 for Chicago. My next thought was self-pity. My area had just been assigned a new code: 909. The absolute worst code possible². 28 pulses required for us bumpkins while only 6 were needed for the cool people in the city. :) [1] There's a good Underunderstood episode on this. Apparently it's not exactly certain this was the rationale. No memo exists detailing it, but it matches up pretty well with how they were initially assigned. (https://underunderstood.com/podcast/episode/area-code-conspiracy-theory/ https://underunderstood.com/podcast/episode/area-code-conspi...) [2] Well, I guess 900 is actually worse, but that's not a geographical area code.
- endgame 5y agoThe thing I want to see written up in one of these conversion projects: how to drive the ringer.
- rovr138 5y agoIt doesn't ring...
- andrewstuart 5y agoYou can't drive the ringer unfortunately because it requires a much higher voltage to drive it, something like 48 volts I seem to recall. Two options for getting around that..... You could install a speaker into the phone and play a recording of a phone ringing. You could install a little electric motor with a lopsided head on the axel and position it in between the ringer arms and spin it at the correct hertz and it would ring the bells.
- TimTheTinker 5y agoEnough to shock a person. I used to take stuff like this apart as a kid. A call came in while I was in the middle of it (yes, I was playing with the incoming wires). Ouch!
- jetrink 5y agoA fun coincidence: someone posted about a similar memory just this morning[1]! > Removing insulation from a live phone wire with my teeth (I had decided to put an extension in my room without asking for help...) was one of mine, that definitely made me more careful. Went just fine until I closed the circuit with my tongue by accident just as someone called. Not pleasant. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29613712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29613712
- kingcharles 5y agoThat's crazy. I did that too, once. I thought I was the only one stupid enough to accidently strip a live telephone wire with his teeth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29621055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29621055
- andrewstuart 5y agoI should do a technical writeup - ion the meantime: Here's a video I made mainly for myself so no polish at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjLPGDQlgKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjLPGDQlgKQ Here's the Python code: https://gist.github.com/bootrino/9c6c82e3243782da23308e50a38686db https://gist.github.com/bootrino/9c6c82e3243782da23308e50a38... In short I installed a Raspberry Pi Zero into the case of the phone. I considered using an esp32 but the Raspberry Pi is alot more straightforward because I can simply run Linux and code in Python. On the esp32 I could write the code in C++ but it would take longer, or use micropython for esp32 but that no doubt would be harder than the Raspberry Pi. I found several YouTube videos and also some web ages that described how to connect the rotary dialler to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi, and I found some example code that captured the number dialled on the dialler. To connect the speaker in the handset it was a little more involved. First I had to work out which wires coming out of the handset cable were the speaker wires - there were four wires coming out, two yellow and two pink. I screwed off the speaker portion of the handset and pulled out the speaker, revealing two yellow wires. The Raspberry Pi zero does not have an audio out port. So I bought the cheapest possible USB audio card for about $20 https://www.centrecom.com.au/shintaro-usb-audio-adaptor-with-35mm-headphone-and-microphone-jack-convert-35mm-headset-to-usb https://www.centrecom.com.au/shintaro-usb-audio-adaptor-with... and also bought a 3.5MM audio cable which I cut and stripped back the two wires and connected them to the two yellow wires from the handset speaker. I knew that the hangup/pickup switch must allow/deny a flow of electricity, so I got out my cheap multimeter and started randomly touching parts of the phones circuit board in two places, and lifting and pressing the hangup switch. Eventually I found two points which resulted in electricity flowing or stopping when the switch went up and down, so I knew this must be right connection points, which I then connected to two of the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. I removed the wire which connected the phone to the plain on telephone line and instead put a USB power cable there. At this point I had worked out how all the various bits and pieces worked so I wrote a Python program to tie it all together. When the phone handset was lifted, I played a dial tone audio file. I had about 60 audio files, which I uploaded to the Linux file system. I gave each audio file a number from 100.mp3 to 160.mp3 so when a phone number was dialled, I searched a list of the files, and if the dialled number matched an mp3 filename then I played that file. I had to remove the bells from the phone unfortunately to fit the computer in. One of the disappointing things is that it is not possible to make the phone ring because the ringer requires a much higher voltage than can be generated by a small computer. You could probably fake this by installing a small speaker and just playing the sound of a phone ringing. Credit should be given to the various people who've written blog posts and on YouTube who have done something like this before me - I read lots of pages and viewed lots of videos that do this in differing ways. This guy was most helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JChn7tV_qBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JChn7tV_qBk. also this person is a real inspiration, she's very creative: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFrHGqsKTvBXk0FC-q_iag https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFrHGqsKTvBXk0FC-q_iag. and this guy takes a completely different approach which does not require pulling the phone apart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siwq1FxvRrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siwq1FxvRrw
- squeaky-clean 5y agoThats such an insanely cool and thoughtful gift.
- LVDOVICVS 5y agoI have and sometimes use a 1935 Western Electric phone and it's associated "subscriber set" with my Google Voice account. The phone itself is completely unaltered, as is the subscriber set. Just a plug for a typical phone jack. I once had a teenager say it was "complicated" to use; dial 9 for and outside line and the number.
- Aloha 5y agoa 202? 1935 is late for a phone with a subset.
- floam 5y agoSomething that looks and acts like a phone that can't call 911 might not be a super idea in a home with elderly.
- cperciva 5y agoIndeed. I hope the author can attach a sign of some sort saying "this is not a real phone" to prevent it from being used in emergencies.
- dotancohen 5y agoThis should not be downvoted. It is actually illegal in many Western jurisdictions. A recent HN thread mentioned it.
- danachow 5y agoIs there really a law that makes it illegal to display an antique phone that isn’t connected to a phone line? Is a box of old cell phones now to be considered a weapon of mass destruction?
- dotancohen 5y ago> Is there really a law that makes it illegal to display an antique phone > that isn’t connected to a phone line? No. However, there are laws that devices which purport to provide telephone service must be able to connect to emergency services. > Is a box of old cell phones now to be considered a weapon of mass destruction? No. There is no expectation that a device that is disconnected or inoperable will continue to function. That said, a _modified_ device that continues to function would likely still be considered under such laws.
- danachow 5y agoThe world is now filled with not too old cell phones that are operable but will no longer function as 3g and below networks are decommissioned - it was similar when AMPS was decommissioned. The expectation that any old phone turning on modified or not will get service is just not realistic. > There is no expectation that a device that is disconnected or inoperable will continue to function If the guts of a phone are replaced then I’d argue that’s no more or less operable then an old cell phone. I think laws in the context of ensuring that device manufacturers provide reliable 911 service is sensible (ie maybe it should be enforced against Google) - but as some nanny legislation because someone might confuse a display piece is a bit silly in my book. (And think of the elderly as insinuated by the GP is weak and insulting - having dealt with demented parents - whether the phone was connected was of no issue - simply identifying a phone was a bigger problem… meanwhile old people aren’t automatically idiots). It’s also absurd to think that someone lacking the situational awareness to identify a non-working phone also has the faculties to read some warning sticker. This is something that comes from a corporate legal department not something that normal people would think to do.
- a-dub 5y agoreminds me of https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/51 https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/51 where they give full instructions for wiring up a whitebox cellphone to an old rotary.
- vbezhenar 5y agoI'm still using that phone in my summer house. I'm surprised that pulse dialing still supported at my telephone provider.
- Aloha 5y agoThe answer is, in most cases so long as you have a traditional landline, they have to do something special to turn it off. No one wants to put in a new switch and find out 10% of their customers cant use their existing phones, so all the carrier grade stuff supports it. VoIP is another issue, you have to hunt a bit harder to find a VoIP ATA with support for it, but they're out there.
- timonoko 5y agoEh. What? Many phone companies in Europe had an option to keep your ancient landline phone. It was just connected to a box that understands rotary dialing and acts as a cellphone. But this generation of subscribers mostly dead now.
- Aeolun 5y agoI have a similar phone, and if I plug it into the wall it works just fine still.
- rswail 5y agoWhere are you located?
- vineyardmike 5y agoDid you read the article? The phone acts as a familiar medium for new content. You don’t call people with this phone, instead it’s used to hear pre-recorded messages from her friends.
- timonoko 5y agoSounds little creepy. I would not want such a gift. When my mother's rotary phone was changed to touch phone, she started to whine it hurts her fingers. I found her rubber covered screw drive handle to poke buttons. This made her happy.
- cinntaile 5y agoSurely you're misunderstanding something here... How are birthday wishes from 60 different people wrapped in nostalgia creepy?
- timonoko 5y agoDepends on the cognitive level of the said granny, but hearing ghost voices in a dead phone is either scary or creepy. I seriously doubt she can appreciate the effort and technological achievement at any level. Nor does she have any fond memories of old crappy phones. In the olden times phone calls were so expensive that everytime the phone ringed it was something serious and mostly bad.
- Borrible 5y agoA blast from the past. You're a great son. At home, I still use a W48 [0], I bought somewhere in the mid-90s on a flea market. Just have to change the carbon capsule microphone every twenty years or so. In doubt, one can change to a simple transistor circuit microphone. My router has a phone jack that provides enough voltage to the bell. Works like a charm. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48_(telephone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48_(telephone)
- jhgb 5y ago> A blast from the past. ... At home, I still use a W48 I was worried for a minute... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48
- atdrummond 5y agoI have a W38 that just bit the dust - worth upgrading to a 48 or should I try fixing what I’ve got?
- Borrible 5y agoNot much different. If its ivory or you like to tinker, you could fix it. Probably just a capacitor or coil. You can find the circuit diagrams online. If its not or you want to spare yourself the hassle , just buy another one. You may even buy a shiny 'new' W48, albeit not cheap: https://www.manufactum.com/telephone-w48-a67326/ https://www.manufactum.com/telephone-w48-a67326/ There also is a german shop selling 'new' spare parts if you need new microphone capsules. Sorry, the website is not in English: https://telefonmanufaktur.de/73-hoer-und-sprechkapsel https://telefonmanufaktur.de/73-hoer-und-sprechkapsel
- osigurdson 5y agoI remember seeing how these switches actually worked in a museum. Quite interesting. https://youtu.be/xZePwin92cI?t=170 https://youtu.be/xZePwin92cI?t=170
- chadcmulligan 5y agoWow, in a museum, makes me feel old, I was trained in how to adjust them in my first career, end of the 70's. Saw the last 'step by step' exchange decommissioned a few years later, I was working in the 'cross bar' exchange next door. The first 'electronic exchange' was built across town - it used solid state switching.
- jacquesm 5y agoCross bar is a super clever concept.
- chadcmulligan 5y agoIt is, I used to love the noise of it, the chunk, chunk as a call was connected. The switches were so big and noisy compared to now, just realised its one of those things thats disappeared into the past.
- jacquesm 5y agoInitially they went the way of the reed relay, then the 4066 happened and after that VLSI. I remember the difference walking around in the large (building size) exchanges in the 80's and 90's where a whole floor of gear would be replaced by something the size of a couple of refrigerators.
- rileyphone 5y agoI recently got a Western Electric 302 on craigslist and am planning to hook my house up on FreePBX/Asterisk, as I live in a 3 story townhome and it would be nice to have the bottom and top floor calling on real phones. Just yesterday I confirmed that it could ring and function normally with a Rotatone EXT and Linsys PAP2T. Alongside that I want to play around with the idea of it as an interface to a speech-to-text application.
- pahool 5y agoWhat's going on in the comment section with the numbers?
- geek_at 5y agoThis is what happens when a big company (in this case Google) is abandoning a former popular product. The spammers take over
- londons_explore 5y agoI think these are used as botnet command and control information. The bots randomly surf the web till they find a sequence of words or numbers that match some preprogrammed checksum or signature, and use some of the numbers as instructions of what to do. The controller's of the botnet then spam the encoded instructions on comment sections all over the web.
- bryanp2021 5y agoThose are lottery results from some province in Vietnam. I have no idea why they appear in the comment section.
- mixmasteru 5y agoI did something similar years ago and used two selenoids to make it ring: https://www.hackster.io/ulrich-pech/iot-red-phone-083cfe https://www.hackster.io/ulrich-pech/iot-red-phone-083cfe
- pnut 5y agoRelated https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html
- unbanned 5y agoWhat does ALOT mean?
- chrisseaton 5y ago'Lot' is just a large number of something. It's where 'lots' comes from if you recognise that?
- spuz 5y agoMy mum's 70th birthday is coming up and I love the idea of giving her a gift like this. However, she is probably not the kind of person who will have fond memories of rotary dial phones so I'd like to implement it in another way. Does anyone have any other suggestions of some piece of technology that she can input random numbers into and receive pre-recorded messages?
- iamstupidsimple 5y agoTV Remote?
- spuz 5y agoI think I have settled on this: an "FM radio". She listens almost exclusively to Classic FM so doesn't really have much reason to touch the dial. But I think she would get a real kick out of adjusting the channel to "tune in" to her friends and family. Some other ideas in case people are also looking for other ideas: - A "safe" dial (when she bought her house they found an old antique safe under the stairs which became a source of some mystery until it was cracked open (it was empty)) - A numeric keypad (my mum used to use this a lot when she worked as a translator and had to memorise the unicode for all the French characters) - Just a simple box with a big rotary dial knob on the front - can't really think of a good story for this though.
- matthiaswh 5y agoI'm not sure why you specifically want to make it [input random number] -> [output message], but if the [input random number] is not the important part... You could buy a portable digital voice recorder and pass it around the family to record their messages. This may not be as much "fun" because most probably won't have the random playback factor. To get that, you could record the messages and load them up on an MP3 player. That will enable shuffle mode. If doing some sort of custom hardware project was an important part of the idea you could wire up a permanent speaker and maybe do a 3D printed enclosure. You could take it a step further and eliminate the MP3 player and do it on a Pi with some hardware buttons. If your mum is or was into vinyl records, there are places that will custom press vinyl.
- quda 5y ago
- Aspos 5y agoBefore reading the article I was sure you installed a SIP client on Raspberry Pi and wired the speaker/mic to the headset so she could actually make calls with it. Still awesome.
- visiblink 5y agoThere are ATAs (Analog Telephone Adapters) that permit pulse dialing. I have one and my old black rotary desk phone is happily VOIPing away.
- reaperducer 5y agoI have a rotary phone hooked up to a VOIP box that doesn't support pulse dialing. There's a guy in Australia who makes little in-line adapters that translate the pulses into touch tones. It's about the size of a U.S. wall jack, line-powered, and works very well. I've had it for something like ten years, so I'm afraid I don't have any contact information. But if he's making them, someone else might be doing the same.
- deivid 5y agoI did a similar thing a couple of years ago, but with a TV instead of a phone (and for my dad). https://blog.davidv.dev/revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift.html https://blog.davidv.dev/revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift.html The gist of it was putting a Pi inside a b/w CRT, soldering the GPIO to the tuner and that way you could change the channels. I even put fake static on some of them. The software ended up horrible as I ran out of time.. but it worked great!
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoWhat an amazing gift. I watched the videos and read the text. I bet your father was proud of you for building it.
- wilsynet 5y agoIf it worked great, what was so horrible about it?
- thinkcontext 5y agoMy parents still have two working rotary phones on their landline. And not one of those fancy, newfangled plastic ones, theirs are metal that hurt my fingers. They are hard wired into the wall as they are from before RJ11 connectors. They got FIOS a while back. The tech that showed up was gobsmacked that the phones still worked after the install.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoBefore RJ11 connectors, phones in the USA were not hardwired, at least not where I was from. There was a 4-prong, large plastic beige connector. When RJ11 became popular, I remember converters from this old 4-prong to the new RJ11 “modular jack” as it was colloquially called. Pic: https://www.oldphoneshop.com/products/4-prong-plug-telephone-jack-ivory-original.html https://www.oldphoneshop.com/products/4-prong-plug-telephone...
- atdrummond 5y agoIt definitely depended on where you were in the US. For some comparison, our home in Quincy, Illinois (built in 1895) did not have a No. 283 four pin setup like you linked; instead, the original phones were hardwired into the walls and the copper. Conversely, my grandparents’ home in Morton, IL had the 283 plugs.
- hyakosm 5y agoIt's a great idea! At home I use a rotary Northern Electric 500 and a french S63 with DTMF keypad, both connected on the same VoIP line with an old ATA box (Grandstream HT502) compatible with pulse dialing. Because of differences between the two phones, I must plug them on two separate ports in the ATA. It can be configured to append automatically a phone prefix when dialing 7 numbers.
- dmz73 5y agoWhy does he hate his mum so much? Rotary phone for an 80yo is like having a guillotine for fingers. I am still in my 40s and I DO NOT WANT to use a rotary phone ever again.