Bakelite To The Future – A 1950s Bluetooth Headset

A decade ago, [Jouke Waleson] bought a Dutch ‘model 1950’ PTT (The Dutch Postal Service) rotary-dial telephone of presumably 1950s vintage manufactured by a company called Standard Elec…

MikroPhone – Open, Secure, Simple Smartphone

Modern smartphones try and provide a number of useful features to their users, and yet, they’re not exactly designed with human needs in mind. A store-bought smartphone will force a number of…

IPhone 15 Gets Dual SIM Through FPC Patch

It can often feel like modern devices are less hackable than their thicker and far less integrated predecessors, but perhaps it’s just that our techniques need to catch up. Here’s an ou…

How The Bell System Was Built

We’ve often thought that while going to the moon in the 1960s was audacious, it was just the flashiest of many audacious feats attempted and accomplished in the 20th century. Imagine, for a m…

Split A USB-C PD Port Into Three Port-ions

There’s no shortage of USB-C chargers in all sorts of configurations, but sometimes, you simply need a few more charging ports on the go, and you got a single one. Well then, check out [bluep…

Lindroid Promises True Linux On Android

Since Android uses Linux, you’d think it would be easier to run Linux apps on your Android phone or tablet. There are some solutions out there, but the experience is usually less than stellar…

Take Control Of MS Flight Sim With Your Smartphone

Anyone with more than a passing interest in flight simulators will eventually want to upgrade their experience with a HOTAS (Hands On Throttle-And-Stick) setup that has buttons and switches for con…

[DiyOtaku] Gives Old Devices A New Life

Sometimes we get sent a tip that isn’t just a single article or video, but an entire blog or YouTube channel. Today’s channel, [Diy Otaku], is absolutely worth a watch if you want someo…

Turn Your Qualcomm Phone Or Modem Into Cellular Sniffer

If your thought repurposing DVB-T dongles for generic software defined radio (SDR) use was cool, wait until you see QCSuper, a project that re-purposes phones and modems to capture raw 2G/3G/4G/5G.…

How Wireless Charging Works And Why It’s Terrible

Wireless charging is pretty convenient, as long as the transmitter and receiver speak the same protocol. Just put the device you want to charge on the wireless charger without worrying about pluggi…

Rabbit Sighted In The Wild

Here at Hackaday we’re suckers for old abandoned technologies, the more obscure the better. The history of the telephone has plenty to capture our attention, and it’s from that arena th…

A Dial Phone SIPs Asterisk

An endless source of amusement for those of advancing years can come from handing a rotary phone to a teenager and asking them to dial a number with it. It’s rare for them to be stumped by a …

IPhone 6S NVMe Chip Tapped Using A Flexible PCB

Psst! Hey kid! Want to reverse-engineer some iPhones? Well, did you know that modern iPhones use PCIe, and specifically, NVMe for their storage chips? And if so, have you ever wondered about sniffi…

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 …

Your 1983 Video Phone Is Finally Ready

If you read Byte magazine in 1983, you might have expected that, by now, you’d be able to buy the red phone with the video screen built-in. You know, like the one that appears on the cover of…

Schematics, For A Modern Flagship Phone

The mobile phone is an expensive and often surprisingly fragile device, whose manufacturers are notorious for making them as difficult to repair as possible. Glued-together cases and unreplaceable …

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 …

Remembering ISDN

We are definitely spoiled these days in terms of Internet access. In much of the world gigabit speeds are common and even cheap plans are likely to be measured in 100s of megabits. But there was a …