LogInAndrew Schmelyun showed off a cool setup that might confuse and amaze you at the same time.
Image credit: Andrew Schmelyun
Are you perhaps bored with your keyboard? Then how about replacing it with something less traditional? This is what, I assume, crossed developer Andrew Schmelyun's mind one day, and he decided to use a rotary dial phone instead.
At first glance, it's impossible to understand how this magic works, how you can type "Hello, world" like this, but if you think hard enough (or just read the comments), you'll see that Schmelyun used ASCII codes to fit all the letters and characters into the dial. And if you want to start a new line, just hang up – it's very satisfying.
Aside from the phone and the laptop, the creator took Arduino's Pro Micro board and an RJ11 jack to make it all work together. In the future, he might also introduce a small OLED screen "to add some more detail to the adapter" and maybe even add the T9 function.
This invention reminded another creator of one of his projects. Till von Ahnen once repurposed such a phone to help him buy weapons in Counter-Strike using its radial buy menu. Looks fun!
I wonder what else you can do with rotary dials. I was sure crafty players had already turned one of those into a gamepad so I went searching and wasn't disappointed. You know that you can play Doom using anything as a controller. Of course, an old phone is no exception.
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