Category Archives: Exhibition

The original phone make has been found

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 […]

Mixed success at #EBMF19

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 […]

East Bay Mini Maker Faire

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 […]

Oh No! Not Make!

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 […]

A cap at a jaunty angle

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 […]

Notes for GrueBox 2 rotary mechanism wiring

This is the wiring block from the rotary mechanism: The connections are as follows with the dial facing down with the wiring lugs at the top, from left to right they are yellow, blue, white, and red. Blue, white, and red are open when the dial is at rest, and closed when the dial is […]

Maker Faire again

I’ll be presenting at the Bay Area Maker Faire again this year. I’ll have a little more to show this year. My hope is to have at least 3 phones working, as well as a fourth under construction at the faire. This is an ambitious goal, and I’m not sure I’ll make it, but I’m going […]

Maker Faire round up

The Maker Faire was excellent, even if there was a significant hardware failure that took the phone off-line for part of Saturday and all of Sunday. It was too noisy to even attempt to play Zork, so I had prepared the framework so it could run a much simpler game called Moonglow, written by Dave Bernazzani […]