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[Max] had a rotary dial from an old telephone and — unsurprisingly — had nothing in particular to do with it. The simple answer? Use an Arduino Leonardo to turn it into a USB keyboard device.

Of course, the Leonardo can easily impersonate a USB keyboard, so that’s the easy part of the project. Interfacing to the dial requires an understanding of how the phone system works.

While today, TouchTone phones are most common, they were quite uncommon for many years. Early phones required you to have an operator connect your circuit to another person’s circuit. Unfortunately for the operators, the system was inherently unscalable and also cost prohibitive.

There were a variety of schemes tried and — supposedly — an undertaker who was angry that the operator was connecting his customers to her husband’s competing mortuary invented the dial telephone.

The details are pretty simple. A typical dial has two contacts. There’s a normally open contact that closes when you spin the dial to any position. It says closed until the spring returns the dial to the home position.

The other contact is normally closed and makes or breaks the phone line. Each time the dial rewinds past a position, the contact opens briefly. Of course, this is a mechanical system, so the software has to debounce the inputs, but that’s easy enough.

If you don’t have access to a dial, you could always print one. Sort of.

Music, food, and coding style have one thing in common: we all have our own preferences. On the other hand, there are arguably more people on this planet than there are varieties in any one of those categories, so we rarely fail to find like-minded folks sharing at least some of our taste. Well, in case your idea of a good time is calling a service hotline for some exquisite tunes, [Fuzzy Wobble] and his hold music jukebox, appropriately built into a telephone, is just your guy.

Built around an Arduino with an Adafruit Music Maker shield, [Fuzzy Wobble] uses the telephone’s keypad as input for selecting one of the predefined songs to play, and replaced the phone’s bell with a little speaker to turn it into a jukebox. For a more genuine experience, the audio is of course also routed to the handset, although the true hold music connoisseur might feel disappointed about the wide frequency range and lack of distortion the MP3s used in his example provide. Jokes aside, projects like these are a great reminder that often times, the journey really is the reward, and the end result doesn’t necessarily have to make sense for anyone to enjoy what you’re doing.

As these old-fashioned phones gradually disappear from our lives, and even the whole concept of landline telephony is virtually extinct in some parts of the world already, we can expect to see more and more new purposes for them. Case in point, this scavenger hunt puzzle solving device, or the rotary phone turned virtual assistant.

prankophone

Prankophone  is the new interactive installation by Dmitry Morozov (his amazing projects have been featured on this blog ).  This time he created  a sound object, a hybrid of synthesizer, telephone and logic module:

The main principle of the object’s functioning is as follows: depending on the current mode, the apparatus calls to random or pre-defined recipients and plays them algorithmic melodies created from their phone numbers. The speakers transmit both the synthesized sounds and the sound from answering person. The common sound layer is involving a random recipient who doesn’t suspect anything. The person who answers the phone can’t hear any other sounds except for the synthesized ones.

You can play with it in 4 different modes:

Autonomous mode –  it generates the numbers by itself and tries to reach them, and play them the sounds.
Manual mode – when you dial any number by pressing standard phone keys it gets automatically transformed into sounds.
Keyboard mode – mode of dialing the number on the one-octave keyboard where 10 keys correspond to 10 digits.
Live mode – the number is defined by any of the previous methods, but the sounds are reproduced not automatically but from the keyboard, thus the user may “communicate” through sound with the person who answered.
It runs on Arduino Mega and you can listen to its sounds on the following video:

Mar
31

Chinese Whispers For Arduino

arduino, arduino day, arduino hacks, Chinese Whisper, telephone Commenti disabilitati su Chinese Whispers For Arduino 

The game of Chinese Whispers or Telephone involves telling one person a sentence, having that person tell another person the same sentence, and continuing on until purple monkey dishwasher. For this year’s Arduino Day, [Mastro] was hanging out at Crunchlab with a bunch of Arduinos. What do you do with a bunch of Arduinos? Telephone with software serial.

The setup for this game is extremely simple – have one Arduino act as the master, listening for bits on the (hardware) serial port. This Arduino then sends those bits down a chain of Arduinos over the software serial port until it finally loops around to the master. The result is displayed in a terminal.

With only about a dozen Arduinos in this game of Telephone, [Mastro] did get a few transmission errors. That’s slightly surprising, as the code is only running at 1200 bps, but the point of this game isn’t to be completely accurate.


Filed under: Arduino Hacks
Mag
24

This Sassy Art Installation is Like The Stanley Parable for the Telephone

arduino, arduino hacks, glados, telephone, the stanley parable, wave shield Commenti disabilitati su This Sassy Art Installation is Like The Stanley Parable for the Telephone 

Insert Customer Feedback Here

Imagine this. A phone on a nearby desk starts ringing. No one is around to pick it up, so you decide that you will be a good Samaritan and answer the phone. You are greeted by a slightly creepy robotic female voice asking you to complete a simple survey. Having nothing else to do, you go ahead and run through the telephone survey. As you start answering the questions, things start to get a bit… weird. The robot voice doesn’t like your answers. She actually disagrees with you, and she does NOT like being interrupted. Now she’s getting sassy with you! What is going on here?

Most likely you are the latest victim of Insert Customer Feedback Here, [Charles'] art installation. You see, that is no ordinary telephone. [Charles] actually removed the guts of an old telephone and replaced them with an Arduino. The Arduino periodically rings the phone, waiting for someone to answer. Once the phone is off the hook, the Arduino uses a Wave shield to start playing back the scripted audio files. All of the text-to-speech files and the various hold music files are played back with the wave shield. The Arduino is also hooked up to the 1, 2, 3, and # keys of the telephone keypad in order to read back the user’s responses.

From here on out the program acts as a sort of “choose your own adventure” game. The program takes different paths and responds in different ways depending on how the user answers the questions. Generally speaking, it will get more “irritated” towards the user if it doesn’t “like” your answers, otherwise it will get less irritated. The hold music will even change to become more or less aggressive.

It’s easy to draw comparisons to Portal’s GLaDOS due to the robotic female voice and to the narrator from The Stanley Parable for the “choose your own adventure” feeling. In fact, if GLaDOS and The Stanley Parable had offspring, this would surely be it. This project brings that same type of silly sarcastic humor to a different medium and it does it well. Be sure to watch the video of the system in action below. It really starts to get interesting around the 1:15 mark.


Filed under: Arduino Hacks


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