A few months ago, Matt purchased a Rotatone pulse to tone module for one of his vintage telephones. It’s a great product, but in the event that you find something you don’t like about its functionality, there’s not a lot you can do about it, because it’s not an open source product. Also, if you’re on a very tight budget, you could save yourself a bit of money building your own.
He writes:
There are a few projects kicking around the internet which make for quite a good starting point. One of the earlier efforts was undertaken by Boris Cherkasskiy and subsequently improved on by Arnie Weber on this bitbucket repository. Arnie includes some gerbers with this, which I’ve fired off to Seeedstudio PCB and made some of my own of, forming the basis of this project. I have to say it is quite a luxury to be building someone else’s design for once!
Matt goes into build details and things he improved on. On generating the tones, he says:
All of these are based on the application note AVR314 from Atmel, which includes some tricky code that generates DTMF tones using the PWM module of an AVR. Complicated stuff.
Like to mod vintage gear? Let us know in the comments!
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