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 […]
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 hooked up the rotary mechanism for GrueBox 2, and it works, first try!
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Wow, it really has been a while, but improvements in technology have given me an idea of how to improve upon the original Dial-a-Grue phone. The idea is to use a small embedded computer, this time a $9 “chip” computer and actually embed it into a gutted phone.  From there I can use text-to-speech (tts) and […]
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 […]