So after much hacking away, I’ve finally gotten the zip code to compile under the Arduino IDE. Â But it doesn’t quite fit.
Brain dead reverse-engineering
When gutting the phone, I went to the trouble to preserve the hook and PTT switch infrastructure. I’m still not sure how I’m going to use them, but I figure that it’d be good to know how they work.
With the help of my trusty cat Ezra, I carefully stripped the end of all the wires, and used the continuity tester on my multimeter with some clip leads to measure what they all did.
Not that any of you care, but if you want to know how they mapped, it’s below the break.
Making the output ugly
Part converting the code for use being fed to a TDD is to make it a long stream, rather than a pretty curses(3) based interface. This means that all the trouble the developers spent on making lines wrap cleanly, and providing vertical breaks between elements is lost.
Gutting the phone
So I started with this phone, but it’s full of phone guts that aren’t going to help the project at all.
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Grue Brains — the plans
Since my original concept was to power this with an Arduino microcontroller platform, I’ve decided to see if I can power it with an Arduino Pro from Sparkfun.
Why Arduino? Why not code to the bare uC? Â Arduino has got a nice IDE, which makes development easier, and it’s got lots of pluggable hardware that simplifies interfacing with stuff like SD cards.
There are a couple of possible problems with this.
- The Arduino Pro has a incredibly anemic 5V regulator.  In a previous project, it couldn’t handle an ethernet shield’s additional power draw.
- The Arduino uses a ATMega 328, which will only give me about 30K of program space. Â Still, Zork used to run in a lot less memory.
If power is a problem, I could always throw an UNO in there, or build my own regulator. Â But if I just can’t squeeze the z-code interpreter into 30K, then maybe I’ll use a Sanguino, or a Mega.