Justine Haupt, who is an astronomy engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, told SWNS, according to Fox News: "I work in technology, but I don't like the culture around smartphones. I don't like the hyperconnected thing. I don't like the idea of being at someone's beck and call every moment and I don't need to have that level of access to the internet."
So she used her tech skills and a 3D printer to print a case and make a rotary cellphone that actually sends and receives calls. It took Haupt about three years to bring the idea to reality.
The rotary part came from a Trimline telephone, Wired reported.
Now this is cool. Engineer Justine Haupt took the rotary mechanism from an old phone, paired it with a microcontroller and a 3G cell transceiver, put that into a 3D-printed casing, and built a handheld rotary cell phone. Here's how: https://t.co/6n79aiRoX9
— WIRED (@WIRED) February 13, 2020
📸: Justine Haupt pic.twitter.com/7Io4a2WFA5
So how does it connect? She used an AT&T prepaid SIM card.
She also added speed dialing to call her husband and her mother and an e-paper display for messages and missed calls, Fox News reported.
Haupt made the phone for herself, and never intended to sell it, but now she's being contacted by people who want to go retro, so she has come up with a kit that people can use to start to build their own.
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