so like, what have you been up to these days?

To start, not much. I have a lot of trouble keeping focused on a single project. IYKYK.

Something that’s been bugging me has been this gif though. I used it on my homepage and it’s a project i’m slowly cooking on for myself because i’m just a fan of the movie if you can’t tell.

Here we can see Cereal Killer looking at his Motorola Advisor. I want it. Now, I could purchase one they’re about like $50 USD right now on eBay but i’m not interested in buying more ewaste. I’d rather create it. So what i’ve been thinking is like what would a more modern ‘pager’ be like or what could the use case be and what would be a fun project to cram into something of a similar shell.

I was not sure until I started playing around with Meshtastic and it clicked for me. The answer was right there. Cram a Lora Mesh device into it. (didn’t specify which flavour of *tasticore).

Okay so some things I would love to have or work with in this kind of a device. I’m going to want it to look like the pager that’s obvious. I’d love to have the entire screen area of the original device be usable but we can figure someting out as times goes on, and I would love to re-create some of these buttons where possible.

Knowing the above in some 3-6am internet surf, the waves were choppy or whatever but I sure did surf and I found this model here of a scan of the original pager in its holser. Not great, since the scan didn’t have more than just this part but this was a start. I can work with this.

I’m sorry I don’t know where I found this scan. It’s out there if you search long enough.

Anyways so I got the scan right lets get to work.

Broke that apart into pieces. I added the face plate from a common case for the device I have in the post. We’ll see how it fits. Nothing is static here.

Now i’m starting to get something I can work with and shove a LoRa device into.

The faceplate I used included some buttons and I kept those. I added some extra meat and connected them to the original buttons. I have no idea if this will work or not I am -really- new to even working with 3D models but nothing better than getting your hands dirty for the fun of it.

I don’t even have the board yet. I just got excited. I also used the antenna mount from the original Heltec v3 case. I might have to rework half this using the v4 but we’ll see.

So this is where I am currently at. I have the model all mocked up. It is not printed yet and I don’t have the parts. When i have this more flushed out I will link the STL file for sharing. I would like to also paint and wear this to look like the characters original pager from the movie. There are many clones of this kind of a project but this one is mine. I hope you enjoy.

Other improvements I would like to make at some point are adding a buzzer for notifications. I would also like to add a larger screen, and make the directional buttons do something. I have seen that some makers have created these using an e-ink display and I think that would be a nice modern solution to this weird display format. What the heck is that like 21×6? No idea and I’m not going to google it. Anyways, here’s where I’m at. If you read any or all of this thank you. Files soon. Toodles. -bee