Very nice job! Last month I also adapted a rotary phone but I replaced the insides with a Bluetooth chip (and some more). Now I can use it as a headset for my smartphone or laptop. While you had to learn about SIP and voltage converters I had to learn about Bluetooth and digital audio protocols. Looks like we both had fun ;)<p><a href="https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-rotary-phone.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...</a>
I grew up with no choice in this matter. Then there was a period when "touch" dialing was available for an exhorbitant premium.<p>There's something so Brooklyn / Portland about wanting to relive this for the romance. It sucked.
A fun fact about pulse dial is that you can dial a digit d by quickly tapping the switch hook d times (zero is 10 taps).<p>This is useful for dialing from a phone with the dial intentionally disabled or removed.
The British GPO746 is another classic model in this category. Just like UK Mellor-style traffic lights, the design was licensed to multiple manufacturers each of whom had their own quirks. This should be labelled as a nerd cognitohazard — once you know, you are at risk of trying to collect one of each type and then compare them (phones <i>and</i> traffic lights)!<p>I too have had little luck getting my hardware to activate the phone’s chimes but that at least led me to another fun quirk. The cabling for the phone has named wires that corresponded to the original switchboard connectors, which looked like enormous headphone jacks. They had two contacts: one at the <i>tip</i> of the plug and one for the collar that sits around the plug behind the tip, separated by insulation. The collar is ring shaped so this part of the circuit is called the <i>ring</i> connection.<p>Whoever dreamt that naming scheme up? It would be like calling the dial — where you <i>set</i> in the number you wanted to dial with you <i>hand</i> — the <i>hand-set</i>! Or calling a mute button the <i>ear-peace</i>!
I miss my Demon Dialer!<p><a href="https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/bc-switching-library/3938-demon-dialer-instructions/file" rel="nofollow">https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/bc-swi...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_dialing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_dialing</a><p><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/364474910535" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebay.com/itm/364474910535</a>
In the 80's we were calling friends in Poland from France. Together with my brother, we were tasked to turn the dial over and over again -- you would need 1 or 2 hours of dialing to get through (I still have the automatic failure message in my head).<p>We found all kinds of tricks to protect our fingers. Today I would try to build a manual dialer based of an ESP32 or something :)
The article's link to sip2sip.info usefully led to a SIP Settings page, which in turn discussed NAT traversal & linked to how to 'Turn off SIP ALG support in your router' on another helpful site.