The Tsushin Booster – A PC Engine Modem Add-on With A Twist

Sometimes, hardware projects get cancelled before they have a chance to make an impact, often due to politics or poor economic judgment. The Tsushin Booster for the PC Engine is one such project, p…

A Brand New USB Modem In The 2020s

The dulcet tones of a modem handshake may be a thing of the distant past for most of us, but that hasn’t stopped there being a lively hacking scene in the world of analogue telephones. Often …

POTS Has Doubled Since The Pandemic

I was diagnosed with POTS this past November at my very first cardiologist appointment. I am not a candidate for “exercise” as a treatment due to chronic pain flares with even slight ex…

The End Of Landlines?

Imagine if, somehow, telephones of all kinds had not been invented. Then, this morning, someone entered a big corporation board room and said, “We’d like to string copper wire to every …

A Crossbar Telephone Switch Explained

There’s an old adage about waiting hours for a bus only for two to appear at once, and for Hackaday this month we’re pleased to have seen this in a run of analogue telephone projects. L…

A Complete Exchange From Scratch For Your Rotary Dial Phones

Such has been the success of the mobile phone that in many places they have removed the need for wired connections, for example where this is being written the old copper connection can only be mad…

POTS At A Hacker Camp

For those of us off the Atlantic coast of Europe it’s a frigid winter as our isles are lashed by continuous storms. Summer seems a very long time ago, and the fun of the EMF 2022 hacker camp …

Old Czech Telephone Teardown Is Beautiful Purposeful Art

The 20th century saw everything from telephones to computers become mainstream. Many of these devices were beautifully designed in the mid-century period, something that’s hard to say about a…

Homebrew Telephone Exchange Keeps The Family In Touch, In The House And Beyond

It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while we stumble upon someone who has taken obsolete but really cool phone-switching equipment and built a private switched telephone in their gar…

The Simplest Electro-Mechanical Telephone Exchange That Actually Works

While rarely seen by users, the technology behind telephone exchanges is actually quite interesting. In the first hundred or so years of their existence they evolved from manually-operated switchbo…

Hackaday Links: September 5, 2021

Good news from Jezero crater as the Mars rover Perseverance manages to accomplish for the first time what it was sent to do: collect and cache core samples from rocks. Space buffs will no doubt rec…