Telecommunications

Texting Trapper Saved by a Faraday Cage

Texting Trapper Saved by a Faraday Cage

This is one of my favorite stories of an eleventh-hour save of a Maker Faire project. Makers Sophi Kravitz and Ollie Tanner built an 8′ bar graph that indicates the signal strength of nearby cell phones. It worked great at home, but not so much at the San Mateo Fairground: Since the idea of the […]

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Phone Booth becomes a Photo Booth

Phone Booth becomes a Photo Booth

Rotobooth, a project by Chris Bell, Liangjie Xia, and Mike Kelberman is a hacked rotary phone that takes your picture as you’re calling your own cell phone, then sends a link to the photos to you by SMS.

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Antique Crank Phone Modded as a Music Player

Antique Crank Phone Modded as a Music Player

Simon Jansen wanted an authentic prop to go with the decor of his workshop while he rebuilds an antique Austin 7 car. He got his hands on an old bakelite generator telephone with a hand crank and decided to mod it to play music while he worked.

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Stop Internet Blacklist Legislation

Stop Internet Blacklist Legislation

We (MAKE) rarely post anything political here and we try to keep the comments non-polarizing when these topics come up – everyone is here to learn, make, share and have fun. However, I personally felt the need to get the word out about SOPA. Please feel free to discuss this the comments, the smart community here has a lot to add to this we’re sure! I’ll be in the comments to keep us all on topic, let’s be cool and productive about solutions :)

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Project Byzantium Aims to Avoid Internet Outages

Project Byzantium Aims to Avoid Internet Outages

At Washington, DC’s hackerspace, HacDC, a team led by the enigmatic “Doctor” seeks to develop a simple system for quickly deploying an ad-hoc internet in the event of internet outages. With all of the recent disasters (both natural and human) which have severed access to the net when it is most needed, groups all over the world have been developing solutions which allow alternate internets to be brought up quickly and effectively.

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The Call Someone Who Cares Button

The Call Someone Who Cares Button

Based on The Awesome Button, Les made a one step boss dialer by hooking an emergency button into his employer’s IP telephone system. Inside the button is a Teensy board, which connects to his computer via USB. A C# app on his computer listens for the pause/break key from the Teensy and makes an HTTP […]

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How to Build the World’s Lightest Quadrifilar Helix Antenna

How to Build the World’s Lightest Quadrifilar Helix Antenna

Project White Star, those intrepid souls trying to fly a weather balloon across the Atlantic, built an excellent helical antenna to be featured as part of their next payload. (The one pictured above is not their final antenna, but one of the experimental ones.) After the scrub on the launch pad for flight attempt A, […]

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