I built a dumb cell phone with a rotary dial | Hacker News Reader

I built a dumb cell phone with a rotary dial

nautil.us

134 pointsdnetesn36 comments

Open articleView on HN

Same story from the original source, previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306801 (572 pts, 165 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22303956 (49 pts, 10 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22352501 (15 pts, 1 comment)

In-depth video of the build:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519476 (6 pts, 0 comments)

Related: someone converted an old rotary phone into a cellphone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9610509 (222 pts, 61 comments)

I was reading about the brain's reward system mainly stimulus, response, reward and how it was used for training US soldiers. I was curious how it related to slot machines since at the time I was in that field.

In that same article it mentioned how going from rotary dial phones to touch tone was an easy transition it's intuitive. But having to go back to a rotary phone after using a touch tone feels terrible. Your brain is expecting you to push the button for the next number not wait. It's interesting to see how you can never really go back and expect to feel the same way.

Do you have a link to this article that you read about?

I don't but I remember the name of it was an article about WWII soldiers who wouldn't shoot at the enemy. The amount of soldiers who shot was something dismal like 10%. Not just pull the trigger and shoot but shoot and shoot at the enemy.

A program was developed by the US military to train soldiers to shoot on command. On the shooting range a target popped up the soldier shot it and when he hit it the target would fall. stimulus: target appears, response: shoot the target, reward: target falls, satisfaction. It got to the point where there was no thought it was instinct, or muscle memory.

I see now it is called "Operant conditioning". In the Wikipedia post about operant conditioning citations mention some of what I am talking about. Wikipedia isn't where I originally read about it I read about was probably 10 or 15 years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

Korea and especially Vietnam (better weapons?) saw the amount of solider shooting the enemy go up significantly.

I'm not sure if the rotary phone vs touch tone was in that same article or if I'm mixing it up with another article.

There is a bizarre consequence that you have to remember all the phone numbers you want to dial or keep a paper contact book with you as well.

Relatedly, how many of you remember a bunch of phone numbers from your childhood. I can recite my best friend's home phone number, my home phone number from childhood, my dad's old office number, and my mom's cell number - despite all but 1 of those numbers having not been valid for 16 years.

Yet ask me to recite any phone number from when I got a cell phone onwards and I only know my own cell number and my wife's because I have to give them to other people or fill them into forms.

I wonder if these childhood phone numbers will continue to be retained / recitable when I'm much older.

It's actually got a neat interface for finding contacts

https://youtu.be/0euCWf0FpOA?t=679

The video is worth a watch. The overall use / nav is remarkable considering it only has a few buttons and a dial.

I just watched about five minutes of this video and unlike most odd tech I come across, I really kind of want this thing.

I never thought I'd want a rotary phone with modifiers.

I always think that learning my family's phone numbers would be essential crisis preparation. Yet I've never sat down and got it done, it's pretty embarrassing.

Could you guys call your mother if you were found somewhere, with no phone? What would you do?

I have built a couple different versions of a rotary dial cell phone over the years but the one that is the most popular that friends and family want is the one that does not have an actual phone in it but instead is a Bluetooth device that pairs with your regular phone. The main reason is it is more of a gag type gift so on one wants to maintain an account or phone number for something you just pull out once in a while for a hoot. I make them for friends and family members if they provide the phone. Everyone loves them !

The first one I ever did was way back in 1997 or around there when I was working for a Wireless company back then. I made it for an April Fools day gag and it just had an old Nokia stuck inside it. We made up a phony marketing flyer for it that had a bunch of funny stuff like; Made by Rotomola, has 10 minute battery life. Goofy stuff. Everyone thought it was great and for a while the marketing people actually thought about making it a product !!! hahaha.

One other fun fact about rotary dials... have you ever noticed how most downtown business districts have low digit prefixes, like 221, 223 etc. That is because it saved time dialing. If you have to dial a bunch of 8's and 9's it takes forever ! hahaha. Probably why most people I make them for play with it for a few days but then it goes on a shelf, they are actually pretty annoying to actually use. But still a fun gag gift.

There's a commercial box which pairs with phones over Bluetooth and offers an RJ-11 jack for classic wired phones. Even provides proper ring voltage and will ring the phone. I've used one at steampunk conventions to provide a phone line for an antique dial phone. It's amusing to let kids try it.

Do you have a link?

Wasn't this on HN previously?

Also, previous dial cell phones.[1][2]

[1] https://youtu.be/1eCAhyJE3UE

[2] https://youtu.be/CxeoQlaQWBM

I love this project, but the ergonomics look kinda bad.

All the crappiness of holding a piece of misshaped plastic to your ear, plus the crappiness of manual dialing, and you can't slam it down to end a call!

If you slam really hard it may work

You'll like my version, then:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/

A side-effect I didn't initially realize: Sound quality is amazing because the microphone runs your voice to your speaker, so you hear yourself talk and it's a much more comfortable experience. I wish modern phones would implement some sort of loopback too, as you hear yourself and end up speaking more quietly as a result.

Sidetone! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidetone

Yessssss thank you!

If only there was an app for enabling this on other people's phones.

Seems you're admiring exactly what you're criticising.

First time I saw this (15y ago now!):

https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/51

Also the coolest!

This is really cool project, but please be careful if you're considering building or purchasing these for emergency or accessibility-related reasons.

The phone's build-it-yourself kit instructions[0] mention that the battery and signal strength indicators aren't yet functional.

"Currently, battery and signal strength metering is not working. I hope to have this fixeed in firmware soon, but this further complicates the above quirk. If you have a voltmeter, it's easy to probe battery voltage without opening the case vai the ICSP header on the back"

From previous discussion[1] it sounds like the battery life is approximately 24h.

Not to be a downer but sometimes it concerns me when we celebrate things which people might consider useful for critical infrastructure when they're not ready.

[0] - http://www.skysedge.us/rotarycellphone/index.html

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306801

It's a fun engineering-art project. Don't depend on it for survival.

Exactly, agreed :)

If you're building a DIY rotary cellphone and are actually concerned with the practical aspects of it, probably the more important aspect is that it only supports 3G. The major US carriers have already shut down large portions of their 3G networks to free up spectrum for LTE and they will likely be completely gone in 1-2 years.

Very cool. Reminds me of the Light Phone version 1 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thelightphone/the-light...

Some of you may be familiar with the original version: http://homepageradio.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html

Someone is reposting this every day from multiple URLs

Every day? I only found 3 previous links to this story, and one link to the explainer video.

Do you have links?

In a scary way, that's almost steampunk.

@mods can you please add https:// to the URL?

Update: Why the down-vote?

> Update: Why the down-vote?

A guess: nautil.us doesn't support https.

I checked prior my comment and https://nautil.us does work, though there is some remote content that is getting blocked - still the site is functional.

But when you try and load the URL for this article with https://, it just redirects to http://.

So it would be pointless to change the URL to https.

Ok, for me with a fresh Firefox 74 profile this does not happen.

https://imgur.com/a/EHpJfGG

OK, fair enough, but some of the linked resources are insecure anyway.

So I guess the downvotes were because people think it's irrelevant for a read-only content page.

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