Mailblocks Makes Your Phone Work More Like The Post, Kinda?

December 23, 2023 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Phones can be distracting, with notifications popping up all the time to snare our attention and maybe even ruin our lives. [Guy Dupont] wishes to be no slave to the machine, and thus built a solution. Enter Mailblocks.

The concept is simple. It’s a physical mailbox which [Guy] can put his phone in. All notifications on the phone are blocked unless he puts his phone into the box. When the phone is inside and the box is closed, the little red flag goes up, indicating “DOPAMINE” is available, and [Guy] can check his notifications.

To achieve this, [Guy] is running a custom DNS server. It redirects all the lookups for push notifications on Android so they go nowhere. Placing the phone in the mailbox turns the re-directions off, so the phone can contact the usual servers and get its notifications as normal.

It’s a novel way of fighting against the constant attention suck of modern smartphones. Rather than being bombarded by notifications in real time, [Guy] instead has to take a significant intentional physical action to check the notifications. It cuts the willpower required and the interruptions to his work in a fell swoop.

We’ve featured [Guy’s] innovative and outside-the-box projects before, too. His smart pants were an absolute tour de force, I might add.

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What Can You Do With Thousands Of Vintage Telephones?

November 20, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 56 Comments

Telephones. We’ve got a few around the place, and some may remember all the weird and wonderful varieties produced over the years. But, vintage phone dealers [Ron and Mary Knappen] may have a few too many. With a large 41,000 sqft property, at least three farm buildings, and no fewer than 33 semi-trailers loaded to busting with racks of phones, the retiring couple have a job sorting it all out and finding someone passionate enough to take over this once-strong business.

Technology has moved on somewhat since 1971 when they got into the retro business, and there are only so many period dramas being produced that could make a dent in a collection of a thousand steel desk phones. Nobody seems interested in taking on their business, so they are concentrating on emptying that large property in order to sell it, but the fate of the crazy number of other storage locations seems uncertain. Perhaps, other than a few museums around the world purchasing a few, this collection really is likely heading to the recyclers.

So what can we do with a vintage phone in this modern era? Here’s a primer to get you started. How about going cellular? Or maybe just add them to your existing designer collection?

Thanks to [Jeremy] and Adafruit for the tip!

A Buzzing, Flashing Phone Ringer For The Elderly

October 11, 2023 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

For a lonely person, elderly or otherwise, the sound of a ringing phone can be music to the ears, unless of course it’s another spam call. But what good is a phone when you can’t hear it well enough to answer?

[Giovanni Aggiustatutto] was tasked with building an additional ringer for a set of cordless landline phones belonging to an elderly friend. Rather than try to intercept the signal, [Giovanni] chose to simply mic up the phone base that’s connected to the phone port on the router and send a signal over Wi-Fi to a second box which has a loud piezo buzzer and a handful of LEDs.

At the heart of this build is a pair of ESP8266 Wemos D1 minis and an Arduino sound sensor module inside a pair of really nice-looking 3D printed boxen that may or may not have been inspired by an IKEA air quality sensor. On the receiving side, a green LED indicates the system is working, and the red LEDs flash as soon as a call comes in.

All the code, schematics, and STL files are available for this build, and between the Instructable and the build video after the break, you should have no trouble replicating it for the hard-of-hearing in your life.

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Grannophone Helps You Stay In Touch

September 10, 2023 by Kristina Panos 20 Comments

Whether it’s distance, pandemics, or both that separate you from your elderly loved ones, what’s the best idea for communicating with them so they don’t suffer from loneliness on top of issues like dementia? We’d say it’s probably something like [Stefan Baur]’s Grannophone.

Back in late 2020, a Twitter user named [Nitek] asked the Internet what could be done in the way of a grandma-friendly video-conferencing solution, provided Grandma has a TV and a broadband internet connection. At first, [Stefan] was like, just get her an old iPad and FaceTime with her. But the question got him thinking. And prototyping.

Grannophones are essentially Linux machines with a video-capable SIP client connected over a VPN for privacy reasons. In simple mode, picking up the handset of one Grannophone will call the other, but more complicated configurations are possible. We particularly like that replacing the handset automatically obscures the camera. That’s a nice touch.

At this point, the Grannophone is a work in progress. The idea is that they be extremely easy to build at the kitchen table, like on the order of disposable Swedish furniture. If you can contribute to the project, please do. Be sure to check out the demonstration video after the break.

On the other hand, if Granny is 1337, you could always video-conference in terminal.

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Portable 1990s POS Will Strain Your Back

August 13, 2023 by Chris Lott 4 Comments

[JR] over at [Tech Throwback] got ahold of an unusual piece of gear recently — a portable Point of Sale (POS) credit card machine from the late 1990s (video, embedded below the break ). Today these machines can be just a small accessory that works in conjunction with your smart phone, but only the most dedicated merchants would lug this behemoth around. The unit is basically a Motorola bag phone, a credit card scanner, a receipt printer, a lead-acid battery, and a couple of PCBs crammed into a custom carrying case

Despite having a lot of documentation, [JR] struggles to find any information on this U.S. Wireless POS-50. He finds that the credit card scanner is an Omron CAT-95 authorization terminal, and the Motorola SCN-2397B phone appears to come from the Soft-PAK series.

He is able to power it up, but can’t do much with is because he is missing the authorization password. But regardless, with the demise of the Advanced Mobile Phone System for over a decade, this 850 MHz band analog phone can’t connect to the network anymore.

If you happen to know anything about this old POS, or used a similar luggable system for accepting credit cards in the 1990s, let us know in the comments below.

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Open-Source Cell Phone Based On ESP32

August 3, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 40 Comments

Over the past decade or so, smartphones have exploded in popularity and seamlessly integrated themselves into nearly every aspect of most people’s lives. Although that comes with a few downsides as well, with plenty of people feeling that the smart phone makes it a little too easy to waste time and looking to switch to something simpler, like an older-style flip phone. If this style of phone is more your speed, take a look at this DIY cell phone which takes care of everything a phone really needs to do. (Google Translate from French)

The phone uses an ESP32 at its core, with a SIM800L GSM modem to interact with the cell network, including retrieving the system time. A small battery is included as well as all of the support circuitry for charging it as well as a USB interface that can communicate to a PC. The operating system for the phone is built from the ground up as well, with a touch screen interface allowing the user to make phone calls, send text messages, store contacts, and a few other basic features. There’s also a GPS application though, allowing the phone to know basic location information.

Another perk of this device is that its creator, [Gabriel], made the design schematics, print files for the case, and the operating system software completely open source for anyone to build this phone on their own. Everything is available on the project’s GitHub page. It’s a fairly remarkable achievement, especially considering [Gabriel] is only 16. And, if you’re not one to eschew modern smart phone technology there are some DIY smart phones available to build as well.

Thanks to [come2] for the tip!

Windows 10 The Hard Way: On A Phone

July 4, 2023 by Al Williams 19 Comments

Sure, there are — or were — Windows phones. But [neozed] wanted something different. An earlier project ran Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 4 with some tricks, but those are sometimes hard to come by lately, so the next project was to put one on a Xiaomi PocoPhone F1.

The choice of phone wasn’t an accident. There was enough support and information on the Snapdragon 845 to pull the trick off, and this is one of the phones that looked like it should work. They were pretty inexpensive on eBay and have 128 GB of flash and 6 GB of RAM.

After a few false starts, the phone yielded to fastboot mode. Loading UEFI firmware allows you to re-partition the disks using a PC. With the partitions set up, you must find an ARM Windows 10 image to load. Sounds simple, but as you’ll see in the post, the devil is always in the details. Combined with a USB dock, the end result is a tiny Windows computer. However, it does seem like a lot of work. Even the original poster says: “TL;DR don’t do it… get a used Surface X instead.”

We’ve seen old phones repurposed before, of course. Or, go the other way: start from scratch and build a new phone. We won’t judge, either way.