Rotary Dial Phone Revival – 2

This is the 2nd part of a multi post series about bringing back to life an old rotary dial phone.

After managing to interface with the dial itself in part 1  it’s now time to do something about the vintage, bells based, ringing mechanism.

Rotary Dial Revival

I know it’s been a long time since my last post, but hey, at least I have an excuse…  he’s 2 and a half and knows no rest or the meaning of the phrase “staying still” 🙂

This is (hopefully) only the 1st part of a series, based around this ’70s Rotary Dial Phone from Eastern Europe. I inherited it from my grandad when he passed away a couple of years ago. This is the same phone that I remember from when I was a kid and would play with at my grandparents’ house… ok, ok, I’ll stop here with the nostalgia 🙂

So I can personally confirm it’s at least 35 years old, but probably more like 40 or 50. Most importantly it has quite a sentimental value for me, which means I have to be careful what I do with it !

stm32f4-discovery art

It’s long been since I gave up any pretense of usefulness for my projects / hacks… now all my projects are “art installations”… (except when it’s something for my 5 year old son, which is always a good pretext to play around with some electronics… 🙂 )

RC Car Electronics

This, to some extent, is a continuation of this post, where I replaced the motors and some gears to fix one of my son’s RC cars.

I remove the electronics and replace them completely, including the remote for which I now use a freshly made wireless Wii Nunchuck.

The results are far from impressive in terms of manoeuvrability, but it was really fun to build and I think the handling can still be improved by tweaking the mix between the 2 joystick axes.

Automotive CAN bus hacking

This 1st video shows the dashboard of a VW Passat B6 2006 being controlled directly by a micro-controller (an old ARM M3 on a LM3S8962 Texas Instruments discovery board) using the automotive CAN bus.

Wii Motion plus Gyros on RaspberryPi

Here’s a really quick post about the Wii Motion Plus (again !) and how to make it work with the Raspberry Pi…

I’ve connected this nice little device to an Arduino (obviously ! 🙂 ), to a IOIO board, a FEZ Domino and even to an obscure TI Arm board, the LM3S8962 using CooCox… so it was only right that I connect it to my “new” Raspberry Pi board.

Connecting the Wii Motion Plus to the Raspberry Pi board

TM1638 Display Driver for Stellaris Launchpad

Here I am, roughly 3 months after my last post…

Android IOIO Wii Motion Plus – Gyroscopes

First of all, the more I work with Android, the more I love it … ! It’s so cool to have both Linux and Java and everything is so open and hackable … !

Wii Motion Plus connected to the IOIO board and then to the Android phone

WiiMote IR Camera with Lego NXT Brick – LeJOS

This previous post talks about how to connect a IR Camera from a WiiMote to an Arduino.

There’s also this one, talking about how to connect it to the .NET micro framework, FEZ Domino board (which also has hardware details on how to extract the mentionned camera and solder it on its own little board…).

It’s therefore time I wrote a quick post, on how to interface this wonderful camera with a Lego NXT Brick, programmed in Java thanks to LeJOS !

WiiMote IR Camera and Lego NXT - LeJOS

Wii Motion Plus gyros on LM3S8962 (I2C on CooCox)

After the initial discovery and a brief “hello world” on my new Arm Cortex M3 board using the CooCox environment, it’s now time for something more “involved”…

And because I’m still in the middle of my quadcopter project, and refactoring it to use the gyroscopes from a wii motion + , what better test than try to read these sensors from the new board ?

LM3S8962 with the Wii Motion Plus gyroscopes connected through I2C