Project 2: Creative Brief, Fantasy Device 2 Using a Rotary Telephone

For the second project for the 2018 Object class at CU Boulder, me and my partner Abbie plan on taking apart a rotary telephone and using its components to make an interactive sculpture. We plan to use a microcontroller and the rotary phone dialing system to create an input device. The goal of this project is to make an entertaining device that is both intriguing to interact with and visually beautiful and interesting. We aim to focus the project on connecting an old analog device interaction with a new more modern digital output.

Materials:

• Rotary Telephone (we don't have yet)

• LEDs strips (have)

• Servo or DC Motor

• Arduino (potentially a mega)

• Seven segment number display (have)

• SD Card Component for Storing Audio (need)

• Hanging lamp components from previous project

Interactions:

The interactive aspect of this project will stem from the rotary dial telephone. I plan to keep the mechanism mostly intact and connect its original output wires directly to the Arduino in order to preserve functionality of the phone speaker, microphone, and rotary dial mechanism. As the user turns the rotary dial mechanism, LEDs around the outside of the circle will light up as each number is passed. I have a few number panels to display the Arduino reading of the phone output. As different numbers are selected, parts of the wall mounted display will light up, move and make sound. The phone will also play sound when it is picked up. We'll be using an sd card component to store sound and play it through the handset speaker. Bellow is a rough sketch of what the display may look like.

References:

• How to disassemble a rotary phone to use as a controller

• how to connect an arduino to a rotary phone(video)

• Arduino Oscilliscope