An old rotary phone converted into a mobile phone
An old rotary phone converted into a mobile phone launched on May 27, 2015 with 222 votes, #91 of 3,670 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 11 years on.
In plain words
This is a project documenting the conversion of a vintage rotary phone into a functioning mobile device. Created by Stavros, it represents the completion of a multi-part series exploring how to adapt old technology for modern use. The project combines nostalgia for analog communication tools with practical smartphone functionality, appealing to those interested in tech modification, retro aesthetics, and hands-on projects.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Welcome to part four of the iRotary trilogy ! This is the part where we complete the project, along with the OFFICIAL TRAILER at the very end (spoiler alert!). The original goal of this post was to complete the project, but I have delayed writing it for so long, that I think it would be better if I just started from the beginning, and produced one, cohesive narrative. As you may remember from part one , I am a very angry person. Especially when talking on the phone, I get easily pissed off, and nowadays there’s no good way to express my frustration. I miss the olden days, where you had a nice physical handset you could slam into the phone to relieve your tension, but mobile phones…from stavros.io
Does a similar job
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20 Dec 2021 [email protected] It's a rotary phone from the 1970's. This is the sort of phone we had in the house when I was...
Rotary Phone Project2024 · github.com · ▲208Adventures with rotary phones and asterisk. Contribute to mnutt/rotary development by creating an account on GitHub.
I've made a rotary dial number input, because why not?2019 · github.com · ▲190A Rotary Dial menu for input numbers. Contribute to victorqribeiro/dial development by creating an account on GitHub.
- HNHacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”2015 · ▲401
(TL;DR: http://i.imgur.com/LuPHqiN.png) While digging around in drawers that hadn't been touched for decades, I found a wonderful piece of history. The Palm Treo 600 [1] was the Mercedes-Benz of the cellphone 10 years ago, and I was lucky enough to rediscover one.[2] So I decided to restore it to working order, slapping in a T-Mobile SIM[3] and a fresh battery. It worked! It could browse the Internet[4], send/receive text messages[5], make phone calls...[6] The onboard browser even passed Acid1[7,8] and could do some level of JavaScript![9] Unfortunately, most websites…
Rotary Phone Dial Linux Kernel Driver2025 · gitlab.com · ▲337A Linux kernel driver that turns a rotary phone dial into an evdev input device. You might be interested in this driver if you - prefer the slow pace of dialing over typing numbers with your numpad, - want to bring your old rotary phone into the digital era, - are an educator looking for a simple example driver with a VM-based end-to-end development & test environment (no real hardware needed) - have another creative use case in mind! This driver was my introduction to embedded Linux years ago—and ultimately led to my career. However, it remained unfinished and unpublished until now.…
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