My day job is basically a DevOps/SRE type role, so it’s unsurprising that I’ve built a lot of monitoring into the phone. Here’s a sample of a discharge/charge cycle of the battery: You can see that heat dissipation during charging is something I still have to work on. 57 degrees C isn’t fatal, but it’s […]
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. […]
I’ve gotta be better with these updates. It’s been about 10 months since my last post. Work on the new phones is slow to non-existent, but I finally spent some time getting the old phone in better shape, both hardware and software. First, the phone is now back in one piece after sitting disassembled for […]
One of the problems I had at the maker faire was that people wanted to try different games, but enabling them all at once caused problems. Â I’m working on a software solution to mitigate some of those problems, but my wife suggested that next year I can have more than one phone available to use. […]
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 […]
This is the first demo of the phone more-of-less complete. Â You can see a video over at my facebook page. Â 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 […]
So, after a several month hiatus, I’m back at it. Â I managed to get all the parts into the phone, though to make room I had to remove the bells from the ringer mechanism, which makes me sad. You’ll notice the USB cord hanging out the back: that’s for charging the on-board 1,100 mAh LiPoly […]
Thanks to an impedance matching transformer from Radio Shack, I can now play audio though the handset. Yay! It still needs to be a little more polished, but the basic concept works. it_speaks.mov
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 […]
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.