5 ms·
The inner beauty of a Tesla Stropkov DS 3600 telephone from the early 1980s
- yread 4y agoThe real Tesla! Sorry, I'm biased my grandma worked there. Their radios were also very stylish
- thomasdd 4y agoWe had this phone at home :) heh
- thevania 4y agohad the same :D
- tmilard 4y agoBeautifully designed. Flashy hot orange, Curved like a woman. Wonderfull
- tempodox 4y agoSo not a built-in car phone of a Tesla vehicle. This one is indeed nice. The color is so 1970s.
- jgrahamc 4y agoIf anyone knows the pinout of the WNB 068 I'd love to hear about it.
- dvh 4y agohttps://elparts.mekweb.eu/ds/WNB068.jpg https://elparts.mekweb.eu/ds/WNB068.jpg
- h2odragon 4y agoThat drawing is marked "WNB 067" ... previous iteration maybe? the two wires to the handset and 4 to the dial confuse me there, too. IIRC its the other way around, isn't it?
- jacquesm 4y agoNote the '/ 068' behind it!
- jgrahamc 4y agoYes. Not seen in my photos is that behind the WNB 068 printed on the PCB is WNB 067.
- tyingq 4y agoNo, it matches the picture: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFb3WmaPXfXfYu0SuEEbQlrs4tGuUbspDPQhaWoUlVjGIeEmIbur-LWa2voanxm6i6pmoUkCNEE73gri0dnQSK1YnVOR9vD02iEy_33a5Z5pUZrPoDprQbCxMMl9yVYP1dH9irB5vlJ738jpKhoEXFTkZ4o1k37Q7WMwt3dcA6WYF_a_QxS2Q/s2597/IMG-0557.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj... Handset being the 2 conductor wire exiting the picture on the right/middle.
- dfox 4y agoThe WNB prefix means that it is an custom application specific hybrid (as in "thick film on ceramic") module, that pretty much means that there never was any kind of documentation for the part. Obviously the function of the thing is that it implements what is called "phone hybrid" (completely different meaning of "hybrid") in solid state without magnetics. Looking at schematics of what is inside the handset it seems to me that it does not even make much sense to think about a pinout of the thing, because most of the pins are used to connect external components that could not be efficiently integrated into the module (essentially a handful of capacitors and overvoltage protection network).
- tyingq 4y agoGiven the peer comment with the schematic, it does feel like there's more you can gather. It appears, for example, that there's a "push to amplify" button on the handset that's not pictured in the post...it doesn't show the other side of the handset where that button probably is. Shown as "-( 21 S 22 )-" on the schematic, bottom left. The wedge shaped metal tab you can see on the backside of the open handset is probably the spring+contact for that switch? So the IC also appears to have an amplifier.
- dfox 4y agoThe "-( 21 S 22 )-" thing is a speaker in the handset. The button is above that, labeled "VAR.". Probably the main reason why essentially the entire electronics is in the handset and why it is somewhat complex is that it does not use carbon microphone, but the microphone is actually the exactly same part as the speaker, used as an dynamic microphone (with the required amplification being done by the hybrid module).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 4y agoAh, yep. I had seen phones like this with the pushbutton, so fooled by past expeirence.
- bobowzki 4y agoThis is a telephone hybrid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_hybrid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_hybrid
- quickthrower2 4y agoWhen things came in colours See also https://miltikablog.cz/retro-telefon-tesla-ds-3600/ https://miltikablog.cz/retro-telefon-tesla-ds-3600/
- black3r 4y agoTechnology 40 years ago was so simple, that anyone with basic education in electronics could understand how this or other basic utilities work and when opened up could identify which component does what and if you identified a faulty component you could often easily replace it and thus repair it on your own, and skilled individuals could probably make their own from scratch if they could source all components and didn't care about patents.... Nowadays even the products which didn't evolve much since then are often made very hard to repair + new technologies are increasingly more difficult to understand and state of the art technology in some areas is so complicated that we're literally dependent on one or two companies who can make it for us (3nm chips for example, or web browsers in software).. It will be very interesting to follow how much the complexity will increase in the next 40 years..
- jacquesm 4y agoIndeed. I always figured that even if the cost to manufacture has gone down for any given piece of electronics that cost to society has actually gone up because instead of repairing things (which also provided jobs) they are now discarded far earlier than they would have been in the past. Much earlier in my life I earned some money on the side repairing electronics and while it is of course still technically feasible the number of one-off components in any given device is so high and the documentation and repairability so low that it just isn't worth it. This was not a good development, but it seems we're stuck with it. The one big plus from all this integration is that devices consume far less power than they used to.
- judge2020 4y agoIt's like cars. Decades ago you might see your local mechanic once a year (if you're lucky) or multiple times a year to fix issues with the car, nowadays there's a good chance a new car will go 100k miles with only wear-and-tear items needing maintenance done.
- jacquesm 4y agoBut if they break you're in for a world of trouble, and you will in one go end up offsetting a good chunk (or more) of what you saved up to that point. In a way this is the result of designing things to outlast their warranty, once the warranty period is over anything that still works was essentially overdesigned. Fortunately for cars and other high ticket items the secondary market will punish brands that are playing it too loose and too fast but I've seen pricing for for instance headlight or taillight assemblies that make you wonder if there is an error.
- MarkusWandel 4y agoOn an analog phone line (two wires) the transmitted and received audio coexist. Obviously the transmitted audio is far, far louder than the received. The hybrid (the parts in the handset) subtracts most of the transmitted audio from what you hear in the earpiece, leaving only a bit of "sidetone". Too little of that, and the phone appears dead. Too much and you distract yourself with your own voice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_hybrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_hybrid
- frosted-flakes 4y agoI wish cellphones had sidetalk.
- NathanielK 4y agoMany of them do. My Android 9 phone has it. The feature only turns on when your calling an actual phone number though, voice calls like Discord don't trigger it. It's not analog, but it's a feature built into the audio chip so there's no noticeable lag. AFAIK, it's not exposed to other software at all, because even the official Google Sound Amplifier app has noticeable lag since it does it in software.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoMy Samsung S10e (Android 12) doesn't do it—I made sure before making that comment. I didn't know that some Android phones do have sidetalk. In my experience talking on a landline, sidetalk makes talking much easier for me, more real somehow. Talking into my cellphone is like talking into the void, and I avoid it whenever possible.
- MarkusWandel 4y agoI've never actually listened for it, but for sure audio calls (on a Moto G Play 2021 in my case) are less than satisfying. As a result I nearly always (except when privacy matters) use it in speakerphone mode.
- leke 4y agoI didn't realise that there was a Tesla before Tesla.
- tpm 4y agoIt was a state-owned electronics company which pretty much ceased to exist after the fall of communism because the products were far behind western and Asian. Some subsidiaries still exist under different names. Edited: apparently Tesla Stropkov still exists under its old name, and even owns the tesla.sk domain
- timeon 4y agoTesla Stropkov was just branch. We had this phone at home but also products from Tesla Bratislava (like PMD) or Tesla Praha. Interesting that Tesla Stropkov is still existing and has retained Tesla logo. I always forget that there is still something in the east (of Bratislava).
- dfox 4y agoThere technically never was a “Tesla Inc.” with separate branches. There was a bunch of essentially unrelated companies named “Tesla something” that used the same brand and (obviously) traded with each other. There was similar pattern with “ČKD” and “Škoda”. Some of these companies still exist under the original name (eg. Tesla Stropkov), some ceased to exist, one of them did slight rebranding (Teco = TEsla KOlin), some of them did more extensive rebranding and restructuralization and some of them were integrated into multinational electronics manufacturers (Philips, Motorola, Infineon, TDK, Sony, Foxconn…). Somewhat interestingly the part of Tesla that originally was Czechoslovak branch of Philips is today owned by NXP, but it didn't happen directly but through Motorola and Freescale.
- alberth 4y agoGotta love jgrahamc is still using blogger.
- jgrahamc 4y agoEvery now and again I think about changing to something else. Most likely a static generator because there are things about Blogger that I dislike (its handling of images, for example) and then I think two things: 1. I'll have to spend forever messing around getting the import right. 2. I'll discover things I dislike about $NEW_THING. And so I stay with Blogger which, apparently, I've been using since 2005! Maybe now that it's been 18 years it's time for a change? If I did change, what should I use? At some point I looked at using Hugo and discovered that there are four different "import from Blogger" tools. No idea which one is the best/works etc. so I was put off.
- frankjr 4y agoThis was the very first telephone model we had at home and was in use until about 10 years ago when we cancelled the telephone service. The actual telephone is still sitting in a closet somewhere.
- mastax 4y agoAre the silver axial capacitors in the handset (near the C2 designator) wet tantalum slugs? Or do they just look similar. It's always weird looking at communist electronics because their components are like an entirely different ecosystem. Nowadays you have 100 companies making electrolytic capacitors but they all look identical outside the colors. Same story for pretty much every component. It's strange seeing anything different. Though this one looks pretty standard.
- dfox 4y agoThese are just normal aluminium electrolytics. Usually these had outer plastic sheath (which makes the package look uninteresting), but they did not have to (AFAIK there were three separate ordering codes for sheath, no sheath and random, with there price slightly decreasing in this order).
- Animats 4y agoWhat are those two big brown cylinders? More capacitors? What did they need big capacitors for? Classic dial phones have no active components and no capacitors. Western Electric loved inductors. If it could be done with an inductor, they'd do it that way. Inductors don't fail unless physically damaged.
- mastax 4y agoThose are almost certainly capacitors. They look like metallized plastic film capacitors, though they could be strange-looking communist electrolytic or something else. Film capacitors are non-polarized, and are available with high voltage ratings. I don't have a great understanding of how old analog telephones work, but I expect that they are being used as DC blocking capacitors on the pair of telephone lines. I think telephone lines provide ~50V DC to power the handsets. Telephone lines are also vulnerable to various higher voltage electrical faults like lightning strikes. So those capacitors would block any DC voltage, while allowing the AC signal to pass through. They need a relatively high capacitance in order to let low frequency sounds through.
- shimonabi 4y agoYou should chech out the Iskra ETA 80 (1980) from Yugoslavia, which was plagiarised in the USA: https://www.tms.si/en/the-bramao-and-iskra-eta-80-telephones/ https://www.tms.si/en/the-bramao-and-iskra-eta-80-telephones...
- electrondood 4y agoSee I knew Tesla was going to make a phone.
- abraxas 4y agoFew tactile experiences are more satisfying than turning the dial of a nice rotary phone. I feel bummed that most young people have missed on this little pleasure.
- lostlogin 4y agoSort of? Having a friend with a phone number that required several full rotations made them deeply irritating.
- whoopdedo 4y agoThe classic US area codes (those with a 0 or 1 as the second digit) are a snapshot of 1940s demographics. The most important cities at the time got the smallest numbers. https://www.lincmad.com/map1947.html https://www.lincmad.com/map1947.html
- germinalphrase 4y agoI genuinely miss having a POTS telephone attached to the wall. Anyone have a recommendations on recreating the experience in the modern age?
- ornornor 4y agoIt’ll be VoIP behind the scenes but you can get these small boxes that basically give you a phone jack on one end and encode everything as VoIP. The phone connected to it sees a POTS and has no clue it’s VoIP. Kinda like how it’s done with most ISPs boxes that give you internet, tv, telephone. I think you can still request a POTS hookup from the carrier but that can’t be cheap and it’s VoIP shortly after anyway, it only makes the copper pair to the VoIP box longer than if you do it yourself.
- viliam_jobko 4y agoCan't believe to see my hometown (Stropkov) on Hacker News! Here's official website of Tesla Stropkov: https://www.tesla.sk/ https://www.tesla.sk/ The phone from the article can be seen in the local museum: https://www.tesla.sk/stala-expozicia-tesla https://www.tesla.sk/stala-expozicia-tesla Stropkov is a small town (population of 10k), relatively poor in EU standards. Tesla Stropkov is still the biggest employer here, so big, that when the shift finishes, there's traffic jam! If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
- jgrahamc 4y agoMakes me want to visit.