In the last year and a half, I’ve done a little cleanup of the code, and also made a couple of improvements. Most notably, you can now use the dial (either rotary or touch-tone) to enter an “extension” where the games can be started. So you can dial ‘4’ to get Guess the animal or […]
The old phone that was used for GruePhone 2 has been identified. It’s a Heemaf type 1955. While attending (virtually) the Hackaday remoticon.2 bring-a-hack meetup, another participant recognized it as an old dutch phone, and pointed me at a couple of different pages that document old dutch phones. One is in dutch, and the other […]
I’ve finally gotten rid of the need to use a Push-To-Talk button. In addition to removing the code that actually waits for it to be pushed, I improved the utterance detection slightly, so that it doesn’t go off with small noises and feed garbage into the modules. In my relatively quiet office, it seems to […]
So the East Bay Mini Maker Faire was a mixed success. A few people were able to get the phones to work fairly well, and even played a few games, and the wifi worked reasonably well so I was able to administrate and monitor the phones. However, the phones mostly were mishearing people in very […]
This is a bit last minute, but I’m going to be presenting the phones at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire on Sunday, October 27th (3 days from now). It’s going to be held at the Park Day School in Oakland (California). I mistakenly believed that when when Maker Media folded (since sorta resurrected), that […]
I was dismayed to hear last Friday about Maker Media ceasing operation. I heard rumors at the last Maker Faire that it would be the last Maker Faire, but I didn’t think the demise was that imminent. The CEO/Publisher of Maker media–Dale Dougherty, is a former boss and acquaintance of mine, and he stopped by my […]
I wrote last year about the demise of NextThing.co, the maker of the CHIP computer inside the gruephone. I thought that meant that all future gruephones would be based on the Raspberry Pi series, mostly the Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+. So I was astounded to discover that you can still buy chip computers, though […]
I finally got Gruebox 2 (the grue-phone based on the rotary chest phone) assembled and sorta working. It’s put together, but I’ve redone the solder joints between the handset and the speaker and mic jacks several times, and they’re still really noisy and temperamental. I will likely have to pull it apart again for some […]
The box-phones are coming together. Gruebox1 (the touch-tone one) is more or less complete, and Gruebox2 (the rotary one) is almost ready to be assembled, however I’ve noticed that the voice recognition is abysmal, which is strange because when I was using an old computer headset to prototype them the recognition was passable, if not […]
I hooked up the rotary mechanism for GrueBox 2, and it works, first try!