With its constant siren song of distraction and endless opportunity for dopamine hits, a smartphone can cause more problems than it solves. The simple solution would be a no-nonsense flip phone, but that offers zero points for style. So why not build your own rotary dial pocket cellphone?
Of course, what style points accrue to [Justine Haupt] take a hit in terms of practicality, but that was never really the point of this build. And even then, the phone appears to be surprisingly useful. It’s based on the rotary dial from a Trimline phone, which itself was an epic hack back in 1965 when it was introduced. The 3D-printed case contains an ATmega2560V microcontroller and an Adafruit FONA 3G cell module, while a flexible mono eInk display adorns the outside. Some buttons, a folding SMA antenna, and some LEDs for signal strength and battery level complete the build, which easily slips into a pocket. The dial can be used not only to dial the phone but to control the speaker volume; in practice, [Justine] mainly uses the speed dial buttons to make calls, though.
We’ve seen rotary phones converted to cell before, but this one is a next-level integration of the retro and the modern. It’s simple, intuitive, and distraction-free, and best of all, it’s a great excuse not to return a text.
Thanks to [J. Peterson] for the tip.
I. Want. One.
Me 2 ! I just can’t stop looking at its photographs. Every single detail is just beautiful, even the plastic veins of 3d printed enclosure looks fantastic!
I’d prefer an actual enclosure, that thing looks like it will die of pocket fluff in a week.
This really wants to be molded into the sole of a mens dress shoe for the “Get Smart” phone.
Then you will kill it even faster with road dirt :-)
I particularly like the “pager-style” display of the missed call. So she could put this in a pocket in her purse, and see who just called simply by looking in without having to remove the phone.
A very nice design.
Brilliant!
Please implement T9 texting with the eInk display for the ultimate in patience-testing.
For those of you who may not know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)
Nah. This is the way to go:
https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA
New Hampshire much? :-)
Do they even have telephones in New Hampshire any more? Honestly I think they don’t even want them.
Not sure I understand why you two are commenting about New Hampshire (the phone’s maker seems to be from upstate New York, not NH), but as a lifelong NH resident I can tell you that telephones are very much a part of a typical NH resident’s life, along with artificial lighting, oil furnaces, automobiles, and even that new-fangled television!
We’re not quite the hicks that some people seem to think. 😜
I’m impressed. Welcome to the 20th century!
Thank you! It’s a strange and wonderful time to be alive! The 1800’s were fun, but I’m looking forward to seeing where this industrial revolution thing takes us.
They sold all their crank ones to Bryant Pond, Maine. :-)
And I think the network in rural Vt/NH/ME is slowly being allowed to deteriorate by the company created to oversee its demise (Fairpoint). Sad, but understandable. There’s just no money in providing wired telephone service any more.
I’ve been told that in some developing countries where wired telephone service never existed, if you want “wired” service to your home, they put a cellular terminal unit on the nearest utility pole and run a wire from that to your house.
thank you!
now i know what to call the project im working on;
cellular terminal unit!
i was going to call it a portable landline or mobile landline as it will fit into a pocket and contain batteries.
I don’t have the skills to make this, but I’d buy one if it was available.
Parachute pants…pocket.
With the e-ink display and that dial you could surely send an SMS using T9 for the ultimate mash up of eras.
What does the ringer sound like? This needs an analog bell.
Might use this library for such projects: https://github.com/Harvie/RotaryDial
Just amazing.
Most stylish device since .. the Trimline phone.
That’s probably where the dial came from :-)
That’s exactly where it came from. She says so in the write-up. The Trimline dial is smaller than a standard dial.
Yes, I believe that’s what [Dan] was referring to as a hack. The hack was that the finger stop rotates with the dial far enough that the dial moves as far as it does on a full-size dial when dialing “1”, without the need for the gap between the “1” finger hole and the finger stop that the full-size dials have, so the dial could be smaller without making the holes smaller.
Interesting. :-)
No, I don’t miss the rotary phone we had much too long. Rotary phone on shared line, no sockets, no (legal) possibility to connect a cordless phone or a modem until in the 1990ies. Ok, one nice gag: you could make the called phone emit a “bim-bim-bim..” sound when using the dial while the other phone was already ringing. But quickly of ending fun.
“Rotary phone on shared line, no sockets, no (legal) possibility to connect a cordless phone or a modem until in the 1990ies.”
When I was at Arizona State in the early 80s I had a 300baud (yeah I’m old) direct connect modem. I ended up buying an RJ11 jack from Radio Shack, cracking open my dorm room wall phone (rotary dial) and wiring it across the phoneline so’s I could use my computer to dial into the Engineering college’s PDP-11. :D
Good attempt but 3G is phased-out/dead … it wont work for long.
Verizon had notified us at work that they were going to kill the last of their 3G cells at the end of November 2019, but they postponed the turndown for a year after tons of customers with old data-gathering stuff out in the field gave them hella pushback.
does it lock with one of those key locks through the dial? then can you bypass it by just clicking the the send button….twice for 1…3 times for 2…..11 times for 0?
I’m going to say “no”.
will it make it thru security at an airport?
Too bad the MOSFET for the pager motor was placed on the wrong side of the supply. It should have been a N-channel MOSFET and have been between the load and GND. Fix for next generation :)
Around 20 to 25 years ago, a friend’s father was in the city for a medical. Since he’d made the trip all the way to the city, he thought he may as well look around. Ended up at the telephone museum. He was looking at their oldest phone, one with a crank on the side. Since there wasn’t exactly a lot of people there, the attendant asked him if he’d seen one before. He said yes, he had one at home in his kitchen. The attendant asked him where he got it. From the phone company; it’s the house phone. He was offered, and accepted, a new phone in exchange for the one in his kitchen. They were out to the small town the next week to do the exchange.
That was when the [hne company would actually provide service because they were charging yo a monthly rental fee.
I so want this and I don’t want to have to build it. I’m an operator not a technician. It’s like Morse all over again.
Not bad but it’s missing something.
I want to be able to pay my cellphone bill by playing a green box into the mic!
Would be great if you could get this to work over Wi-Fi so you could use Google Voice (voice.google.com) Sort of a pseudo VOIP.