Our home has a rotary phone in most of the rooms (they're cheap on ebay and easy to repair if they're not working). Each one is plugged into a Grandstream HT802, which gets it onto our home network. A raspberry pi runs FusionPBX, which gives each phone a number, and lets them all dial each other. The kids love it!
The very complexity of the stuff they build is part of the problem. They are typically very smart, but often build Rube-Goldberg machines instead of looking for a simplification.
an easy way to find work to help with on github is to go to hackaday or some other such 'hackaton/diyer' community and follow the project links -- you can spend the entire evening fixing foot-guns and lazy/naive implementations of fairly well understood early CS concepts -- that's not to say that professionals don't make the same mistake, but amateurs who are just trying to get something to work rarely hit the codebase again after the thing does what they want.
When you interrogate, they'd say almost sheepishly 'oh I'm no programmer I just threw this together.' I don't think they realize 98% of programmers are just throwing things together and acting like a God when it actually works...
Inspiring. Love when people do this. Makers gonna make . . .
My only nit is the local/nonlocal/alt switch is unnecessary. Local & nonlocal numbers have a different number of digits. Checkdown logic can determine which it is. The phone book certainly has less than 7 digits of pages, and less than 7 digits of contacts per page. The only issue is determining if a short number is for a contact or a contact page. That can be dealt with by pressing a different button than the call button if it's a page navigation.
For me, my question would be how much of the production is outsourced? Hopefully there will be more videos about the production/business side.
I am kind of surprised most tech professionals -don't- have basic electronics dev gear at home given how accessible it is these days.
Go learn to make a thing! You will feel more pride in it than a few more hours of doom scrolling.
[0] https://www.skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html [1] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro#Specifications
> Rotary Cell Phone (Description and Build) (youtube 52 mins)
> Mar 5, 2020 My open source rotary cell phone went viral (surprisingly, to me and my husband), and people seem to be interested in it. The original description with links to notes and design files is here: [2] and a starter kit is now available here: [3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0euCWf0FpOA
It is fun! But I hate people with a lot of 8's, 9's, and 0's in their numbers. They take forever to dial :)
That's when you cheat and just input the pulses with the switch hook by pressing them quickly. 8 times in rapid succession for 8, 9 for 9, 10 for 0.
Hopefully then it does have a real physical stop---otherwise it'd be quite hard to dial correctly!
In a "real" rotary dial there's a governor which controls the speed of the return, thus setting the impulse rate so that the step-by-step switches in the exchange can follow.
Every phone tech back in the day would take considerable care to set the governor speed, and would instantly recognise when it was wrong.
The moving finger stop also appeared in 1960s versions of the Lineman's Test Set (the "butt set", usually hung from a tool belt), where the dial was on the back of the earpiece.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimline_telephone
[2] https://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/images/dl/misc/schmoo.jpg
[3] https://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/telephones-trimline-artic...
No. Moving to the stop is just to wind up the mechanism up to a defined point. After being released the dial turns back at a defined speed, and creates a number short on-hook spikes, depending on far it has been wound up - the number to be dialed.
It's possible to quickly tap the hook to dial a number, too. It's easy for low numbers, but the dial helps the slow ones of us to tap exactly 9 clicks in the defined time to dial a 9.
No idea if that un-smartphone works exactly like the real thing.
I’ll die on a hill for ex-spearmint though. That’s ok. She can’t be right about everything.
Meanwhile in multi-lingual laboritories all around the world where 'international English' is the language everyone uses, or attempts to, and 'experiment' is a word used multiple times a day, I keep hearing both. Which gives me the impression there might not actually a single right way anymore, or perhaps there never was (as in: could be British vs American or older brritish vs newer), and I stopped caring.
I realize there might still be people claiming their way is correct, in which case I have to ask: is there a single authorative reference? Only if there are no other references to be found claiming something else you can in my opinion be right, when it comes to language. Or else you have to narrow down your claim and specify a region, or a certain type of usage.
For example recently someone pointed out I'm wrong not using a comma after 'e.g.' or 'i.e.'. Which sounded strange to me, because I keep on reading that, including in redacted texts. That person then came up with one single textbook as reference, claiming it's the authority. I went looking around and easily found other texts, which definitely seemed to be reference-worthy material according to where they were used and referenced in turn. I never got a good answer to my question why I should believe that one book is 'the' authorative one and the others aren't so as far as I'm aware both forms are ok.
English is the best and worst language we have currently on the planet because it’s such an amalgamation and continuing to evolve and branch in ways that are hard to keep up with sometimes. It’s hard not to end up chugy don’t ya know.
However I can actually see it being quite attractive for accessibility reasons. Where it always being in one mode ready for dialing the same way every time has its advantages.
But I guess this is the problem when you turn a hobby project into a niche business. You suddenly have to amortize the development costs over a small number of sales. Otherwise there's no point making it your sole means of income.
And from the initial 3D printed model to a custom made production run takes many times the amount of time it will have taken to build the prototype.
In this case there's the pick & place machine to consider too. I'm surprised she didn't outsource this. These things are expensive and I doubt she has enough parts to run it 24/7 to get her money's worth.
But no way I'll consider buying one at this price. Great project though!!
