What do you do when you find a nice corded phone with giant buttons out in the wild? You could pay $80/month for a landline, use a VOIP or Bluetooth solution instead, or do something a million times cooler and turn it into a jukebox.
Now when the receiver is lifted, [Turi] hears music instead of a dial tone or a voice on the other end. But playback isn’t limited to the handset — there’s a headphone jack around back.
To listen to a track, he can either dial one in directly, or call up a random track using one of the smaller buttons below. A handy directory organizes the tunes by the hundreds, putting children’s tracks between 1-99 and the intriguing category “hits” between 900-999.
The phone’s new guts are commanded by a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is a great choice for handling the key matrix plus the rest of the buttons. As you may have guessed, there’s an DF Player Mini mp3 player that reads the tracks from an SD card. Everything is powered by a rechargeable 18650 battery.
Jukephone is open source, and you’ll find more pictures on [Turi]’s blog post. Be sure to check out the very brief build and demo video after the break.
We need to see this on a rotary dial phone
Actually, there’s a project to repurpose rotary dial phones to play classic songs from the era of a person with dementia:
https://www.joyphone.org/manual
“Turi
London”
What fantastic mail service!
Base the music on the last three digits of any number entered, remove the legend and have it powered from the phone line for maximum prank value.
What’s Rick Astley’s phone number?
You could even hash the song artist and title and use the first n digits of the decimal hash as the phone number. 🤓
If you dial 867-5309… you get Jenny… If you call the OPERATOR you get The Manhattan Transfer… but if you Call Me On The Line… you’ll get Blondie…
Love it. There is something about using a phone like this.
I had great fun converting an old pink Japanese payphone, to dial music. Dial a year and it selects a random Japanese track from that era. I also have a old bakelite GPO rotary phone that you prefix the year with an international dial code to widen the choice of music for when I am not in the mood for Japanese.
Play ‘take on me’ from ‘a-ha’ on it.