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 […]
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!
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 […]
There’s an old engineering meme about wd40 and duct tape. It’s really true. The dial mechanism on the rotary gruebox was slow and balky–running maybe 1/4 the speed it was supposed to, and one shot of wd40 and it’s running right as rain. Contrary to popular myth, wd40 isn’t a lubricant exactly. It’s mostly a […]
I’ve gutted the rotary chest-phone that I am going to make into the third gruephone. What’s amazing to me is how little there actually is to them: Other than the bell, it’s just a dozen or so discrete components on a simple circuit board, mostly capacitors and resistors, with one transformer thrown in. The rotary […]
So, if I’m going to have 3 working phones for the Maker faire, I better get to building them. Today’s project is to get the keypad working. Oringally this keypad used a touch-tone signaling mechanism, but that wasn’t necessary for my purposes, so I just cut out all the DTMF hardware to get at the […]