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 […]
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 […]
In a flurry of activity, I’ve added yet another game. This time the classic “Hunt the Wumpus‘. It’s fairly faithful to the basic version, though the numbering of the rooms is different (still a dodecahedron though.) For those not familiar with the game, you are an intrepid explorer in a cave with 20 interconnected rooms. […]
This is the first demo of the phone more-of-less complete. You can see a video over at my facebook page. Apologies for those who don’t use facebook, but the raw video is too big for wordpress to handle. After the demo, I decided that it was time to tear the phone apart and try interfacing […]
This post is long overdue. The hardware has been complete (enough) for weeks now, and the software has been improving incrementally. It is the impending arrival of the Maker Faire that finally prodded me enough to finish writing this up. I’ll be there showing this off. Here’s what the completed project (mostly) looks like: (more […]
In order to interface the modem with the telephone, I bought a simple device called a tele-coupler. It is used when only have a phone that doesn’t have a standard jack, or is a digital phone line. It actually straps to a telephone handset and accoustically couples the phone and modem together… wonderfully old-school, […]
What I hope will be the final piece of the puzzle arrived today. It’s a little adapter that turns a regular modem into an acoustically-coupled modem. 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 […]
The key to making this project work is allowing it to communicate with the old TDD. To do that, I’ve managed to acquire a couple of TDD modems, specifically designed to talk to TDDs. The Intellimodem can even do Baudot, which the TDD does (at 45.5 baud[*]). More after the break