a couple people sent this one in (thanks)–turn an old looking phone in to a bluetooth headset. in this example from tech tv uses a jabra bluetooth headset and an old fashion phone to make a seriously pointless, yet cool, bluetooth headset.
Build Your Own Batphone
i have a phone line in the house, but haven’t plugged a phone in to it in over 3 years. i keep it around since i use dsl, but now that i’ve seen this neat project, i think i’m going to make a batphone. this how-to has pretty much all you need, i think i might make a slightly different version where the bat phone is a bluetooth headset, then i don’t need to use the phone line.
Mod The Keypad And Leds On Phones
you might not have this specific phone, but it’s a good mod to learn from if you plan to hack up your current handset. for $10 you can get some super-bright leds (of whatever color) and practically make a new phone. you’d think handset makers would start offering light-brite style phones by now huh?
Turn A Pocket Pc In To A Wifi Phone
i’m using vonage, the voice over ip service, and it turns out you can get a special type of add-on called a “softphone account” which allows you to use software on a mac, pc, linux computer to make and receive phone calls as well. turns out you can use just about any wi-fi enable pocket pc as phone too.
Radioshack Phone Dialer – Red Box
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.
A Brand New USB Modem In The 2020s
The dulcet tones of a modem handshake may be a thing of the distant past for most of us, but that hasn’t stopped there being a lively hacking scene in the world of analogue telephones. Often that’s achieved using old devices resurrected from a parts bin, but sometimes, as with [Brian]’s USB modem, the devices are entirely new.
A surprise is that modem chips are still available, in this case the SkyWorks IsoModem chips. It uses an M.2 module format to allow the modem and support circuitry to be separated enough to place it in another project if necessary, along with a clear warning on the PCB not to put it in the identical-looking PC slot. It also comes with tips for experimenting if you don’t have access to a landline too, given that POTS is fast becoming a thing of the past itself in so many places.
If you’ve got nowhere to show off your modem, we’d like to suggest you try a hacker camp. There you’ll often find a copper network you’re positively expected to hack.
Raspberry Pi Becomes Secure VPN Router
OpenWRT is a powerful piece of open-source software that can turn plenty of computers into highly configurable and capable routers. That amount of versatility comes at a cost, though; OpenWRT can be difficult to configure outside of the most generic use cases. [Paul] generally agrees with this sentiment and his latest project seeks to solve a single use case for routing network traffic, with a Raspberry Pi configured to act as a secure VPN-enabled router configurable with a smartphone.
The project is called PiFi and, while it’s a much more straightforward piece of software to configure, at its core it is still running OpenWRT. The smartphone app allows most users to abstract away most of the things about OpenWRT that can be tricky while power users can still get under the hood if they need to. There’s built-in support for Wireguard-based VPNs as well which will automatically route all traffic through your VPN of choice. And, since no Pi router is complete without some amount of ad blocking, this router can also take care of removing most ads as well in a similar way that the popular Pi-hole does. More details can be found on the project’s GitHub page.
This router has a few other tricks up its sleeve as well. There’s network-attached storage (NAS) built in , with the ability to use the free space on the Pi’s microSD card or a USB flash drive. It also has support for Ethernet and AC1300 wireless adapters which generally have much higher speeds than the built-in WiFi on a Raspberry Pi. It would be a great way to build a guest network, a secure WiFi hotspot when traveling, or possibly even as a home router provided that the home isn’t too big or the limited coverage problem can be solved in some other way. If you’re looking for something that packs a little more punch for your home, take a look at this guide to building a pfSense router from the ground up.
