Matters arising/Long tail of the unexpected

[hirez]

A couple of years ago, an enterprising set of soldering-wallahs in the US cut the guts out of an old Bell rotary phone and fitted it with a lashed-up cellular rig. The GSM module was the 'easy' bit, the LD-to-binary was a one-cigarette problem solved with a PIC. I have this vague idea that it would have been simpler to do it with some CMOS logic, but I am likely stupid and wrong.

(Two-cigarette problems are less tractable. It's one of the many DHM phrases that have passed into common JH-R parlance.)

Anyway. As jarkman discovered, they'll sell you a kit to do it now.

Only a little boggled, I was curious to know if there was a UK distributor for the GSM module they use. There is. And they'll sell you a GPS unit for sixpence that can be bolted on the side.

To repeat myself, I can't immediately think of a use for any of it, but bloody hell. I want one now, just because. Because this mad post-scarcity long-tail pre-oil-crash environment we're living in is filled with odd little modules that allow a chap to fit a location-aware GSM powered camera to his toaster, so one can take pictures of people making toast and upload that picture tagged with time and location to one's photo-weblog.

To mangle another DHMism, 'Think of something, then wait for a bit. It will be invented for you. And come with a USB interface.'

Elsewhere, I'm not sure what it is about this image, but it's really rather, um, gosh, yes quite.
[FX: Fans self]
A bit of a surprise, that.

Elsewhere elsewhere is this. I am duty-bound to draw your attention to the third track, because I ran out of shame sometime last week.

Comments

[echo-echo.livejournal.com]

You'd need a butler or a rucksack to carry one round in. But having your butler present you with a Bakerlite rotary dialing mobile phone sounds utterly opulent. And pulling one out of your rucksack on a bus would be surreal in the extreme. Not sure how far I would go to actually make one, but I like the idea. :)

[mr-flay.livejournal.com]

It did occur to me that if one were to convert a candlestick phone, then one could (assuming that the user had donned a proper suit jacket) have the earpiece hanging concealed in the left breast pocket with the cable discreetly living within the collar, and the speaker housed in the right inner breast pocket. Upon hearing the phone, one could simply pull each component out, press a concealed button on the earpiece and take the call. The rest of the electramonic trickery can be housed in various pockets in the jacket.

Utterly absurd, but raher charming!

[echo-echo.livejournal.com]

Actually, I suspect you may actually have to give people the phone to let them hear it for themselves. Otherwise they would probably mark you as mad or an eccentric performance artist talking into a non-operative phone.

[mr-flay.livejournal.com]

I'd still absolutely love to have one, though - hell, I'll even chip in the candlestick phone...

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Oh - did you want a toaster controller to go with all that ?

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=81

[hazeii.livejournal.com]

We've used those modules in a few projects; most fun was video capture using an Arcom Mercury ARM SBC running linux with attached Webcam and the Round solutions modules providing GPRS upload of the resulting video/still images to a website.

You can get GSM/GPS modules from other supplies as well (Siemens/Motorola also make them) but the Round Solutions one have the advantage they provide ready-made PCBs you can hack with.

Having said that, initial prototyping is easier with modules like these (http://www.rfsolutions.co.uk/acatalog/GSM_Modems.html) - the command set/interface is almost identical to the Round Solutions kit (it's just the GPRS sign-on that's slightly different).

[redcountess]

Heh, bloody geeks —they all comment on the phone and not the Tashlin still ;-)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Well, quite. It's not like I find 40's hairstyles particularly anything. It's always been about what's between the ears.

[neilh.livejournal.com]

Theres something oddly familiar about that price list, I seem to remember fantisising that one day, maybe, I would get around to building something with such a module.