Anyone who looks closely at the current mobile phone market will find a very defined pattern: huge screens, ultra-thin designs, absurd batteries, and ridiculous prices. These 'app launchers' seem to have fallen into an evolutionary pit, and as expected, there are people out there who have decided to seek alternative solutions. One of them is engineer Justine Haupt, who, in addition to building her own phone based on Arduino, installed a rotary dial as the main element of its interface.
The smartphone world is convinced that its salvation (at least in the short term) lies in foldable designs. A simple search for the term 'foldable phone' on Google will explode your screen with news and other developments. In fact, mobile phones were supposed to take over the 2020 edition of the Mobile World Congress, but the fear of the Coronavirus (along with other details related to a certain Chinese manufacturer) ensured that didn't happen.
While the world debates whether we need foldable phones or not, there are people out there who not only reject the current smartphone offering but follow their own path. The case of engineer Justine Haupt from the Cosmology Instrumentation Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory especially catches our attention, and the reasons go beyond the retro factor.
Why a Rotary Dial?
Let's remove the obvious: the phone uses a rotary dial, apparently taken from a classic Trimline telephone. Why? The engineer explains that her goal is not to be anachronistic or anything like that. In reality, she decided that in this annoying and fussy world of touchscreens, full of hyperconnected people using phones they neither control nor understand she wanted something that was completely her own, personal, and absolutely tactile, at the same time giving her a reason not to send text messages. She also highlighted the most positive aspects of her design:
- A real and removable antenna, with SMA connector (you can replace it with a directional solution)
- A legitimate phone function, i.e., it's not a mini computer with an app called 'Phone'
- Speed dial with physical buttons, assigned to the people she talks to most (for the rest, she uses the dial)
- Almost instantaneous battery and signal levels, without lag
- E-paper display with low power consumption
- If she wants to modify something on the phone, she can do it
- The power button is a real button
- Almost 24 hours of battery life
The Evolution of the Prototype
The prototype took its first steps with an Arduino Micro and a 3D printed case, but it was too delicate. With the second revision came the PCB, however, its work was not finished because the battery barely lasted two hours, and the Adafruit FONA 2G module turned out to be a mistake (2G networks are about to disappear). The third version (and for now the final one) uses an ATmega2560V, a 'low-power' variant of the conventional ATmega2560.
Open Source and Resources
Interested? If the answer is yes, we have good news: the design is completely open source. On Haupt's personal page you'll find all relevant files, as well as a more detailed build guide.
Official site: Click here
https://old.neoteo.com/zerophone-smartphone-diy-basado-raspberry-pi-zero/
