It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Â Once the Maker Faire was over, I kinda lost steam, but it’s time to sum up. Â It was great to see all of you out there, and I had a great time showing the device off. I got a little media coverage. Â HackADay wrote up a short piece, […]
This post is long overdue. Â The hardware has been complete (enough) for weeks now, and the software has been improving incrementally. Â It is the impending arrival of the Maker Faire that finally prodded me enough to finish writing this up. Â I’ll be there showing this off. Â Here’s what the completed project (mostly) looks like: Â (more […]
In order to interface the modem with the telephone, I bought a simple device called a tele-coupler. Â It is used when only have a phone that doesn’t have a standard jack, or is a digital phone line. Â It actually straps to a telephone handset and accoustically couples the phone and modem together… wonderfully old-school, […]
Many of the terminals in the phones I might use have connectors designed to attach to screw terminals. This makes it a little difficult to attach to a standard Arduino. Â Here is my way to adapt them.
What I hope will be the final piece of the puzzle arrived today. Â It’s a little adapter that turns a regular modem into an acoustically-coupled modem. Â It’s intended for use when there isn’t a regular phone line available—you can strap this to a regular handset instead. I decided to do a proof on concept, just […]
I supposed I should have figured this out earlier, but there just isn’t enough SRAM for the zip interpreter to run the Zork I story file. Â It is trying to malloc() approximately 30KB of ram for various data structures, and the poor little Arduino Mega only has 8. Â It might be possible to […]
As I said in a previous post, It looks like a standard Arduino just doesn’t have enough memory, so I found an Arduino Mega, which is based on the ATMega 1280 rather than the 328. However, when I got the Mega from MakerBot Industries, it refused to accept any new program uploads. Â Every time I […]
While the original phone I bought for this project is uber-cool, the fact remains that it’s not quite period appropriate to the time when Zork was at its peak (1977-1983). Â So a little time wandering though the world’s biggest bazaar showed me an alternative. Â It came labeled as “No Sound from ringer, works okay” […]
The key to making this project work is allowing it to communicate with the old TDD. Â To do that, I’ve managed to acquire a couple of TDD modems, specifically designed to talk to TDDs. Â The Intellimodem can even do Baudot, which the TDD does (at 45.5 baud[*]). More after the break
So, by commiting acts of unspeakable hackery, I’ve gotten it small enough to load onto the Arduino: Of course it doesn’t run, but that’s a different hurdle.