radioshack phone dialer – red box
posted Sep 5th 2004 5:58am by Phillip Torronefiled under: misc hacks
i thought i’d start out with this hack while we’re in beta, since it was one of the first ones that really got me interested in the way phones worked and how many consumer electronics can be used for new and educational things. a “red box” was a device that would simulate coins being dropped in to a pay-phone, hence free phone calls for many people until the phone systems changed. the most popular device to modify was a radioshack tone dialer, a simple solder of a 6.5536 mhz crystal was all it took and you could “drop” 5, 10 and 25 cents at a time to make calls.





You can take one of those hallmark cards with the recorder chip… take off the mic and put on a jack, solder the “card switch” wires to a real switch and record the tones using your sound card on your PC. Costs like $10? The entire thing (speaker and all) fits in an old dat tape case.
Posted at 8:55 am on Oct 9th, 2004 by Michael