flâneur

Open Source Rotary Cellphone

justine-haupt.com · 951 words · saved by 1 readers

Why a rotary cellphone? Because in a finicky, annoying, touchscreen world of hyperconnected people using phones they have no control over or understanding of, I wanted something that would be entirely mine, personal, and absolutely tactile, while also giving me an excuse for not texting. The point isn't to be anachronistic. It's to show that it's possible to have a perfectly usable phone that goes as far from having a touchscreen as I can imagine, and which in some ways may actually be more functional. More functional how? So it's not just a show-and-tell piece... My intent is to use it as my primary phone. It fits in a pocket; It's reasonably compact; calling the people I most often call is faster than with my old phone, and the battery lasts almost 24 hours. Originally I was intent on making this a quick and dirty project. I laid everything out flat to make a proof of principle phone and used an Arduino Micro as the controller: Then I thought I'd just stuff it into a 3D printed enclo

Open Source Rotary Cellphone home For the new rotary cell phone click here: Rotary Un-Smartphone A quick history: This project went viral in early 2020. Concurrently, I was in the process of starting an open source tech company ( Sky's Edge ) for robotics, but everyone was asking me to sell the rotary cell phone. I reluctantly released a kit-version of the project described on this page, which I maintain for posterity, of which just over a hundred were sold. Having resigned myself to making un-smartphones a significant part of Sky's Edge, I concluded early on that there should be a much more r

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