Use Raspberry Pi for a Modern Day Telegraph #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Use Raspberry Pi for a Modern Day Telegraph Make

Turn new technology into old with this guide from Make. Using a Raspberry Pi you can start tapping out morse code in no time (well it will take some time)!

Our first Morse telegraph system was made of two hand-wound electromagnets connected by a salvaged telephone wire. An AC transformer powered the magnets, which rattled against strips of scrap metal with an ear-wrenching 60Hz buzz with each dot and dash.

Use Raspberry Pi for a Modern Day Telegraph Make 2

Luckily, our technical skills have improved since then. What would happen, we wondered, if we took the bare-bones simplicity of a physical Morse key and connected it to the internet? When the Raspberry Pi Zero W came along, offering a web-connectable board that would fit in a project box for $10, we decided to find out.

Several prototypes and programming languages later, we had a tidy laser-cut 3″×5″ box with the Pi, buzzer, and one large button. Push the button, and a Golang client on the Pi sends a signal through a WebSocket server, turning on the buzzer in all the other connected telegraphs. The Pi’s configuration lets you set the channel to which your telegraph connects, allowing open channels that anyone can listen and talk on (like amateur radio Morse bands) and private ones for you and your cohorts. Both server and client code are open source, so you can hack and modify at will.

See the full guide here!


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