Cramming Dual SIMs & A Micro SD Card Into Your Phone

August 16, 2019 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

There are plenty of dual SIM phones on the market these days, but most of them are a hamstrung by packaging issues. Despite their dual SIM capability, this usually comes at the expense of the microSD card slot. Of course, hackers don’t accept such nonsense, and [Tweepy] went about crafting a solution. Sadly the make and model of phone aren’t clear.

It’s a simple case of very carefully shaving both the microSD card and the nano-SIM down until both can fit in the card tray. The SIM is slimmed down with the application of a heat gun helping to remove its plastic backing, saving precious fractions of a millimeter. The SD card is then filed down to make just enough space for the SIM to fit in underneath. Thanks to the springiness of the contacts in the phone, it’s just barely possible to squeeze both in, along with some Kapton tape to hold everything in place.

Your mileage may vary, depending on the construction of your SD card. Overall though, it’s a tidy hack that should prove useful to anyone with a dual SIM phone and limited storage. We saw a similar hack a few years ago, too.

[Thanks to Timothy for the tip!]

Control Your Web Browser Like It’s 1969

July 23, 2019 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been tasked with developing a device for interfacing with a global network of interconnected devices. Would you purposely design a spring-loaded dial that can do nothing but switch a single set of contacts on and off from 1 to 10 times? What kind of crazy world would we have to live in where something like that was the pinnacle of technology?

Obviously, such a world once existed, and now that we’ve rolled the calendar ahead a half-century or so, both our networks and our interfaces have gotten more complex, if arguably better. But [Jan Derogee] thinks a step backward is on order, and so he built this rotary phone web browser. The idea is simple: pick up the handset and dial the IP address of the server you want to connect to. DNS? Bah, who needs it?

Of course there is the teensy issue that most websites can’t be directly accessed via IP address anymore, but fear not – [Jan] has an incredibly obfuscated solution to that. It relies on the fact that many numbers sound like common phrases when sounded out in Chinese, so there end up being a lot of websites that have number-based URLs. He provides an example using the number 517, which sounds a bit like “I want to eat,” to access the Chinese website of McDonald’s. How the number seven sounding like both “eat” and “wife” is resolved is left as an exercise to the reader.

And here we thought [Jan]’s rotary number pad was of questionable value. Still, we appreciate this build, and putting old phones back into service in any capacity is always appreciated.

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Bluetoothing Beautiful Phones

May 11, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

You’ve seen a landline phone converted into a Bluetooth headset. There’s nothing new there. It’s great for confusing kids when asking them to dial a rotary phone, but that’s about it. It’s the same phone, built by Ma Bell for fifty years, converted with a little Bluetooth breakout board.

You’ve never seen a landline conversion like this. This is [Alessandro]’s Bluetooth-converted Beocom 600, complete with a drop-in replacement circuit board that turns this beautiful Bang & Olufsen design into a useful device for the smartphone era.

This phone was designed as Bang & Olufsen’s entry into phone design, and we’re shocked, simply shocked, that Apple hasn’t tried to lift this design yet. Unfortunately, it’s designed for landlines, making it horrifically inconvenient to take to Starbucks. That’s where the Bluetooth comes in, and [Alessandro]’s custom board that is meant to replace the guts of this vintage phone. Honestly, with Bluetooth modules it’s probably easier to deal with that instead of a telephone line.

Right now, the work is concentrated on the user interface, which means taking apart and mapping the pinout of the buttons. This keypad is plastic over rubber domes contacting a polyester sheet with contacts, feeding out to a ribbon cable. It’s fantastic work and finally some of the best design out there will be brought into the modern era.

Rotary Phone Gets Bluetooth Upgrade

May 4, 2019 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Rotary dial phones have a certain romantic charm about them; something never quite captured in the post-Touch Tone era. With landline phone services less popular than ever, these old workhorses aren’t really cut out for daily use anymore. However, with a modern brain transplant, they can still get the job done just fine.

[Xabier Zubizarreta] has undertaken to retrofit his FeTAp-611 rotary phone with a Bluetooth rig, allowing it to be used with smartphones to place and receive calls. A Raspberry Pi Zero W serves as the brains of the operation, chosen for its compact size and onboard Bluetooth and WiFi. Getting the Pi to work effectively with an Android phone as a Bluetooth audio device requires some trickery, but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed by custom compiling a few off-the-shelf tools. [Xabier]’s next big hurdle is finding a tidy way to generate a 30 VAC signal to drive the original ringer, something that proves difficult for most similar projects.

We love to see these telecommunication relics kept ticking, so if you happen to be building a vintage telephone exchange in your garden shed – be sure to let us know.

The Galaxy Fold, Or Why Flexible OLED May Not Yet Be Ready For Prime Time

April 25, 2019 by Maya Posch 92 Comments

Samsung’s fancy new high-end smartphone with a flexible, foldable OLED display has been failing in worrying numbers for the first reviewers who got their hands on one. Now iFixit has looked into the issue using their considerable amount of smartphone tear-down experience to give their two cents. They base many of their opinions on the photos and findings by the Verge review, who were one of the (un)lucky ones to have their unit die on them.

The Galaxy Fold was supposed to be this regular smartphone sized phone which one can open up fully to reveal a tablet-sized display inside. The use of a flexible OLED display was supposed to create a seamless display without the annoying center line that having two individual displays would produce. Unfortunately it’s this folding feature which produces issues.

As iFixit notes, OLEDs are rather fragile, with their own tear-downs of regular OLED-equipped devices already often resulting in the damaging of the display edges, which spells doom for the internals of them as oxygen and other contaminants can freely enter. This means that maintaining this barrier is essential to keep the display functioning.

This is probably the reason why Samsung chose to install a screen protector on the display, which unfortunately was mistaken for a protective foil as found on many devices. The subsequent removal of this protector by some reviewers and the mechanical stress this caused destroyed some screens. Others had debris trapped in the fold between both halves of the display, which caused visible bumps in the display when opened.

The relatively massive spacing between the hinge and the display seems almost purposefully engineered to allow for the ingress of debris. This combines with the lack of any guiding crease in the center of the display and the semi-random way in which humans open and close the Fold compared to the perfectly repeating motion of the folding robots Samsung used to test the display. It seems that Samsung and others still have some work to do before they can call folding OLED displays ready for production.

Finally, have a look at this video of Lewis from UnboxTherapy pulling a folding robot with opening and closing a Fold one-thousand times:

House Training A Military TA-1024A Field Telephone

April 24, 2019 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

After spotting some interesting military phones at a museum, [CuriousMarc] wondered what it would take to retrofit these heavy duty pieces of telecom equipment for civilian use. He knew most of the internals would be a lost cause, but reasoned that if he could reverse engineer key elements such as the handset and keypad, he might be able to connect them to the electronics of a standard telephone. Luckily for us, he was kind enough to document the process.

There were a number of interesting problems that needed to be solved, but the first and perhaps largest of them was the unusual wiring of the keypad. It wasn’t connected in the way modern hackers like us might expect, and [CuriousMarc] had to end up doing some pretty significant rewiring. By cutting the existing traces on the PCB with a Dremel and drilling new holes to run his wires around the back, he was able to convert it over to a wiring scheme that contemporary touch tone phones could use.

An adapter needed to be fabricated to mount a basic electret microphone in place of the original dynamic one, but the original speaker was usable. He wanted to adapt the magnetic sensor that detected when the handset was off the hook, but in the end it was much easier to just drill a small hole and use a standard push button.

The main board of the phone is a perfect example of the gorgeous spare-no-expense construction you’d expect from a military communications device, but unfortunately it had to go in the bin. In its place is the guts of a lowly RCA phone that was purchased for the princely sum of $9.99. [CuriousMarc] won’t be able to contact NORAD anymore, but at least he’ll be able to order a pizza. The red buttons on the keypad, originally used to set the priority level of the call on the military’s AUTOVON telephone network, have now been wired to more mundane features of the phone such as redial.

While this is fine for a one-off project, we’d love to see a drop-in POTS or VoIP conversion for these phones that didn’t involve so much modification and rewiring. Now that we have some documentation for things like the keypad and hook sensor, it shouldn’t be hard to take their idiosyncrasies into account with a custom PCB. Dragging vintage gear into the modern era is always a favorite pastime for hackers, so maybe somebody out there will be inspired to take on the challenge.

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Telephone Plays The Songs Of Its People

April 12, 2019 by Sven Gregori 4 Comments

Music, food, and coding style have one thing in common: we all have our own preferences. On the other hand, there are arguably more people on this planet than there are varieties in any one of those categories, so we rarely fail to find like-minded folks sharing at least some of our taste. Well, in case your idea of a good time is calling a service hotline for some exquisite tunes, [Fuzzy Wobble] and his hold music jukebox, appropriately built into a telephone, is just your guy.

Built around an Arduino with an Adafruit Music Maker shield, [Fuzzy Wobble] uses the telephone’s keypad as input for selecting one of the predefined songs to play, and replaced the phone’s bell with a little speaker to turn it into a jukebox. For a more genuine experience, the audio is of course also routed to the handset, although the true hold music connoisseur might feel disappointed about the wide frequency range and lack of distortion the MP3s used in his example provide. Jokes aside, projects like these are a great reminder that often times, the journey really is the reward, and the end result doesn’t necessarily have to make sense for anyone to enjoy what you’re doing.

As these old-fashioned phones gradually disappear from our lives, and even the whole concept of landline telephony is virtually extinct in some parts of the world already, we can expect to see more and more new purposes for them. Case in point, this scavenger hunt puzzle solving device, or the rotary phone turned virtual assistant.

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