Show HN: Midnight Reminders via Morse Code
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I am now a teacher, and the task you describe got me thinking. It would be tempting to teach the association of letters with their related visual patterns of dash/dots. However, a 10 year old might do better if they learned the sound-forms of the letters as discrete entities, in the same way that they leaned the shape-form of the alphabet.
When I was 12 (1957) and really needed to practice code, talk to friends on my primitive homebrew ham radio, I instead dreamt of having single sideband. They say youth is wasted on the young, certainly true for me. :)
Since we're talking about something entirely out of touch with modern life, I suggest an app that converts spoken code to plain text. Before having proper radio equipment, my friends and I would speak Morse code to each other, and somehow make ourselves understood. Among our classmates we already had a reputation for being out of touch with reality. This practice cemented the assumption, more by design than accident.
73 de Paul KE7ZZ
Either way, a fun idea!
73 de Sean N3RTW
but seriously, this is a neat idea. and kudos to OP for building a full prototype -- this is the level of geekery I show up for.
I remember the days of T9 on the old Nokia phones. I was so good that I didn't have to look down at the screen.
My favorites were fixed in my phone. I knew how many down clicks on the button would land on the right friend/family member. I could literally send messages from my pocket.
And yes, I admit -- I did engage in texting while driving. And this is the part where I justify it -- "but I had eyes on the road the whole time!"
Oh! and there was old skits on late nite where people woudl compete with the old morse code guys.
To be clear - I am not sending myself long emails! I am sending one or two words, like "TEMP PROB" or "MULCH" to jog my memory in the morning. And for that, it has worked flawlessly.
Also, from the guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Your idea sounds great - can you give me a suggestion (e.g. a M-C/Mouser/Digikey part#)?
- N2SXX
[1] The smaller one of these three https://alchetron.com/cdn/cykey-1e503a20-c830-4bb5-9dcf-7b44... all with the same chord keys for faster typing on a small device.
[2] https://siwriter.co.uk/the-chord-codes this app looks to use the same chords and links to an old intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBM_FwkMMKE
Here is an example of someone building a touch midi controller [0] with nothing more than a custom PCB and some resistors or a touch input device with varied inputs like sliders and buttons [1].
That said, yes, I could have had it talk SMTP directly - there is a SMTP library that works in MicroPython - but I figured I'd rather be able to do some stuff "in the middle", and not have to update the device itself. For instance, I might decide I want to have it consolidate all the messages into a single email. I can do that easily by updating my endpoint, without having to ever touch the device.
And the endpoint is self-hosted, by the way.
1. Use one of those handheld landline phones with numbers.
2. Connect it to asterisk via an ata/voip adapter.
3. Configure a dial plan to log dtmf tones
4. Enter message using numberpad like on any old telephone.
5. Translate those numbers to text using t9 or any other custom scheme.
If it works, it can do a lot like dial extension 1 for email, 2 for sms to someone else or 3 to control your devices. Keep in mind, setting up dial plans is probably the most challenging part in this whole setup.
But yours is wonderfully creative solution. It also has possibilities for use in Hospitals and by disabled and others who have severely limited ability to communicate.
Lots of possibilities for this.
Patent 6418323 Wireless mobile phone with Morse code and related capabilities
I see there are at least two of us!
The purpose is so you can secretly text other people under the table while in a boring meeting.
Besides, I'm pretty sure the patent has expired.
My motivation on this was simply that I am an inventor, and what's an inventor without a patent here and there? The stuff I invented for D has not been patented.
Patents are supposed to protect innovators, to encourage public release of innovative ideas. Yet your patent would stifle useful, though in this case not particulalry innovative or broadly useful, tools.
what is being protected by your patent, and others like it? An afternoon of thought. Not even a prototype in your patent, just lazy half assed schematics.
patents like yours hold back society. Again, not this patent in particular, but the many like it. Just look at patent trolls. Usless dregs of society, making things difficult for true innovators by abusing a system that was supposed to benefit humanity.
Keep in mind that phones at the time did not have side buttons, the side buttons on my iphone are ergonomically unsuitable for use as a morse key, are in the wrong location for it, and there wasn't an app store then.
I've also had many people copy my ideas, steal my software, and claim they invented them and wrote them. It gets a little tiring. I've used a registered copyright to stop some of those claims. Having a patent means I can solidly claim originality.
I also hoped someone would see the patent and want to implement it, as I was focused on other things.
Conversely a person could start patenting obvious ideas (morse code + cell phone seems like one) and then thousands of people independently arrive at the idea unaware of prior work. So now all that legal paperwork backing meant to fight off the startup type, the dragon, is used on an innocent - he who fights dragons should be careful not to become a dragon himself
IMO the patent system here is transformed into a "first person who calls dibs is the winner!" type free for all, and we get professional dib-callers. And the reason why it happens is the content of the patent, the ideation, execution, is all rote simple and not all that innovative.
I am not arguing against the concept of patents either, just that in their modern implementation they are not fit for the purpose they are supposed to have.
I went to his memorial service. There was quite a crowd there. Eric created a ripple in the universe.
A CGI script isn't anything special. It's just "a thing that gets called with some environment variables, and prints out some text (on stdout) for the web server to send to the client".