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This retro-looking rotary cellphone is free of modern-day distractions

Arduino TeamFebruary 13th, 2020

What we carry today in our pockets is nominally called a “phone,” but more often than not we’re using it to do various other computing tasks. Justine Haupt, however, wanted an actual phone that “goes as far from having a touchscreen as [she could] imagine.”

What she came up with is a rotary cellphone that’s not just a show-and-tell piece, but is intended to be her primary mobile device. It’s reasonably portable, has a removable antenna for excellent reception, a 10-increment signal meter, and, perhaps most importantly, doesn’t make her go through a bunch of menus to actually use it as a phone. Other features include number storage for those she calls most often and a curved ePaper display that naturally doesn’t use any power when revealing a fixed message.

The project was prototyped using an Arduino Micro. It was then laid out of a PCB with an an Adafruit FONA 3G board and an ATmega2560V, programmed in the Arduino IDE.

Haupt has published a detailed look at the build process here.

Boards:Micro
Categories:ArduinoFeatured

2 Responses to “This retro-looking rotary cellphone is free of modern-day distractions”

  1. FischAutoTechGarten Says:

    This is a very well executed project! Good work!

  2. go4sea Says:

    Such a fancy idea!

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