Morse Code Translator

I've always wanted to make a messaging app that would vibrate in Morse code when you get a message. I love the idea of feeling a message in my pocket and 'reading' it without looking, but I'm also not great at deciphering it, so it wouldn't get much use.

As a kid I didn't have a phone, but my parents gave me a cheap iPod Nano. I flashed a custom OS on it (RockBox), which used Morse code as the primary input, since iPods only have a single button.

Programming in lua and writing my diary in Morse code on this microscopic device was a lot of fun.

Morse was a clever way to bypass limitations, which is the definition of hacking itself.

I've been learning it, mostly as a fun hobby.

I journal a little bit about my experience here: https://owoga.com/posts/2025-03-18-learning-morse-code/

I've been a licensed HAM for a while, but what actually prompted me to start learning Morse code was when I was troubleshooting some hardware that only had a blinking light to communicate back to me. Instead or print statements, I started using blinks to tell me what was happening. I realized it would be so much faster if I knew Morse code.

LICW is a great place to learn. But I also recently discovered https://morsecode.world/ and really like it.

Related: The book "The Victorian Internet" [0] by Tom Standage was very interesting. I never realized how many social things that were impacted by the broad use of the telegraph would have future analogs during the dotcom age. Highly recommend!

"For centuries people communicated across distances only as quickly as the fastest ship or horse could travel. Generations of innovators tried and failed to develop speedier messaging devices. But in the mid-1800s, a few extraordinary pioneers at last succeeded. Their invention--the electric telegraph--shrank the world more quickly than ever before.A colorful tale of scientific discovery and technological cunning, The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it. By 1865 telegraph cables spanned continents and oceans, revolutionizing the ways countries dealt with one another. The telegraph gave rise to creative business practices and new forms of crime. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by its skeptics. And attitudes toward everything from news gathering to war had to be completely rethought.The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press. Its saga offers many parallels to that of the Internet in our own time--and is a fascinating episode in the history of technology."

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28949978

Me and the other nerds used to send each other notes written in Morse code in high school.

This site is timely. Just the other day I turned on the emergency setting on my flashlight and thought oh that's an interesting pattern. Why would it flash three long then three short then three long? About 30 seconds later I realized that I had forgotten an entire alphabet.

Like 1/3 of all Escape Rooms use it.

The Wordle spinoff Morsle (https://morsle.fun/) inspired me to learn Morse this year. It's been surprisingly enjoyable listening exercise.

I've been waiting for maybe some 15 years for some statistical method or (more recently) AI model able to decode live Morse Code in HF radio (CW as ham radio operators usually refer to it). This has been challenging not only because radio transmissions SNR is always changing and, just like handwriting, each operator sends Morse in its personal way (unless, of course, they use a PC keyer).

Long ago at a startup, In-System Design, I was on a team that made one of the first USB-to-ATA mass storage adapter chips. Small company, having fun, one of us put in an easter egg so that when the drive was plugged in and before the OS enumerated it the drive activity light would blink our team cheer, "ISD rocks!", in morse. He even added a test to make sure it worked in verilog simulation.

The chip was fairly successful and years later someone out in the world noticed the funny blinking on their retail USB drive that used it and they figured it out. They wrote a letter to the editor of Byte or Dr. Dobbs or something, wondering what the message "Sis you rock!" meant. Twisted sister fan, maybe?

We saw the letter in the magazine and were chuffed that our easter egg had hatched but... It turns out the designer had typoed the table of ASCII-to-morse values and dot/dash timing he used to build the messaging circuit, so it really was saying "Sis you rock!". And because he also wrote the test it didn't catch the error. Doh!

On http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ you can still see and listen to people using Morse code live in the purple amateur radio bands, usually on the lower frequencies (left part of the purple ranges)

Every ham radio operator kind of aspires to use it regularly!

While we're on the topic, I wrote a little Python script that generates Morse Code 'palindromes'.

Ie playing a word backwards results in another word.

The most interesting one I found is TREVOR / ROBERT

Other notable mentions:

    fins / sail
    urea / nerd
    waits / sting
    loops / spoof
    queer / reedy
    rebel / fever