Piotr Esden-TempskiSome night impressions from #ToorCamp last week. 1/n
#ToorCamp sign animation. 3/n
Someone brought this beautiful RGB LED droplet installation. It was quite mesmerizing to watch. #ToorCamp impressions 4/n
Of course @shadytel was at #ToorCamp. And @spacegirl brought two teletypes to hook up to the network! You could chat with people in the upper camp from the lower camp via teletype!!! "mechanical keyboards" can't hold a candle to the feel of typing on a teletype! :D 5/n
Here is the other side of the connection. Both machines were nice crowd magnets. :D #ToorCamp 6/n
And all that in a place that is postcard worthy. Thank you everyone who made the event possible. I hope to see you all in two years again! :) #ToorCamp 7/7
JeffG@esden telephone circuit or raw loop?
@orion3311 They were hooked up to the POTS network via acoustic couplers. I saw the current loops were going into the acoustic couplers. Not sure about other details... you have to ask @spacegirl
Sarah Autumn@esden @orion3311 The normal TTY loop for these machines is 130V DC, current limited to 60mA. It's enough to wake you up if you put your hand in the wrong place, and it really smacks you hard when the receive magnet opens and all of that stored energy has to go somewhere.
We opted to just use POTS lines off of our switch (a Lucent Definity) and acoustic coupler modems to change the TTY pulses into something that was a little friendlier to send across camp.
@esden @orion3311 The acoustic coupler modems surprise folks, but really, they're super dumb. When they see 130V level on the TTY loop, they make a tone, and when the TTY loop goes to 0V, they make a different tone. There is absolutely no handshaking, and no user-configurable settings.
They were originally used by the Deaf community in the pre-internet days to communicate with each other. Big TTYs of this sort were super cheap on the used market, and they were stripped and modified to be ....
@esden @orion3311 ...converted into communication devices that you could have in your living room to talk to your Deaf friends. (They didn't really mind the noise, for obvious reasons). The modems have inductive pickups on them, and the phone is placed on top. When the phone is called, the ring is detected by the inductive pickup, and the modem turns on a built-in AC outlet, into which the user plugs in a lamp or other visual signaling device. It's quite clever :)