Vintage Rotary Phone Turned Virtual Assistant

Like many of us, [Zoltan Toth-Czifra] has completely embraced 21st century living. His home is awash in smart gadgets and dodads, from color changing light bulbs to Internet-connected cameras. But he’s also got a soft spot for the look and feel of vintage hardware, like the rotary phone he keeps kicking around to remind him of the old days. He recently decided to bridge these two worlds by turning the rotary phone into a modern voice controlled assistant.

The first piece of the puzzle was getting the old school phone connected to something a bit more modern, namely a Raspberry Pi. He didn’t want to hack the vintage phone apart, so he picked up a Grandstream HT801, an adapter that’s used to convert analog telephones to VoIP. [Zoltan] says this model specifically fit the bill as it had a function that allows you to configure a number to dial as soon the phone is lifted off the hook. This allows the user to just pick up the phone and start talking without having to dial anything manually. If you’re looking to pull off a similar setup, you should check to make sure the adapter has this function before pulling the trigger.

With the rotary phone now talking a more modern protocol, [Zoltan] just needed to get the Raspberry Pi side sorted out. He installed a SIP server so it could communicate with the HT801 adapter, and then got to work putting together his virtual assistant. Rather than plug into an existing system, he rolled his own by combining open source packages for controlling his various smart devices with the aptly named SpeechRecognition library for Python.

Right now he’s only programmed a few commands that his system can respond to for controlling his lights and music, but mentions that the system is modular enough that he can add new functions easily. He’s put the source for his virtual assistant framework up on GitHub, which he notes was written in less than 200 lines of original code by virtue of utilizing existing libraries for a lot of the heavy lifting. Open source is a beautiful thing.

In the past we’ve seen rotary phones go mobile thanks to GSM upgrades and dragged kicking and screaming onto the modern phone network with a built-in Raspberry Pi. But we think there’s something especially appealing about the approach [Zoltan] took which preserves the phone’s original hardware.

Continue reading “Vintage Rotary Phone Turned Virtual Assistant”

Rotary Telephone Becomes Stylish Lamp

The vintage aesthetic is more popular than ever, and while things like rotary phones aren’t particularly useful anymore, there’s a lot of fun to be had using them in new and inventive ways. For this project, [Sander] built an attractive table lamp out of a Siemens rotary phone.

Switched off, the lamp appears to be nothing more than a phone with its handset floating in midair. However turn the dial, and LEDs mounted in the receiver begin to glow. Taking things a step further as good hackers do, [Sander] used a motorised potentiometer to control the LED brightness with a NodeMCU board featuring the ESP8266. This allows the LEDs to be dimmed either by hand, or by a smartphone connected over WiFi, without the dial getting out of sync.

By using a dual H-bridge setup, the NodeMCU is able to both control the motorized pot as well as generate an AC signal to activate the original bell in the phone, which adds a whole lot of nostalgia points. Fitting the motorized pot into the phone did lend some challenges but that didn’t slow [Sander] down – they simply used a cheap universal joint to allow the motor to connect to the rotary dial off-axis. A great trick to keep in your back pocket.

For the haunting floating effect, [Sander] used a meter of 4 mm brass rod, bending it into shape to hold up the handset. This was used as a ground, and along with a couple of extra wires for power, was covered in a black textile sheath recovered from another electrical cable. [Sander] tells us it wasn’t the easiest thing to pull off, but we definitely agree that the effect is totally worth it.

Thirsty for more vintage ephemera? Check out this rotary phone that runs on GSM. Video below the break.

Continue reading “Rotary Telephone Becomes Stylish Lamp”

Hackaday Links: December 11, 2016

We have a contest going on right now challenging you to do the most with 1 kB of data. If you want to get into this, here’s how you do it for a dollar. Use the PIC12C508A. It’s an 8-pin DIP, has 768 bytes of program ROM and 25 bytes of data RAM. [Shaos] is trying to generate NTSC on this thing.

Remember that Internet of Cookie Oven Kickstarter from the links post a few weeks ago? It was funded. It has a heating element that is ‘more energy efficient than traditional electric elements’, and there’s still no consensus over how a resistive heating element can be more efficient. It’s either 100% efficient, or 0% efficient, depending on how you look at it.

[Matthias Wandell], master of wood gears recently built a 20″ bandsaw from scratch. It’s a wood frame, wood wheels, a (currently) underpowered motor, and a few bits of metal and rubber. The video build log is fantastic, so start here and work your way forward.

Way back in the day, Sparkfun sold a Bluetooth rotary phone. Yes, at some point in the past, phones didn’t have touchscreens or even buttons. In any event, Sparkfun hasn’t sold these phones for quite a long time. Now there’s a new hotness: giving these rotary phones a GSM module.

Here’s a little Hackaday Events housekeeping. On January 23rd, we’re going to have a meetup in NYC. We’ll also have a meetup in LA sometime in January as well. Also in January I’ll be attending CES, reporting on the latest Internet of Toasters. A week later, Hackaday will be at ShmooCon in Washington, DC. At ShmooCon last year, we had a breakfast meetup in the DC Hilton. This year, I want to do something similar. If you have an idea of what to do, leave a note in the comments.

Retro Rotary Raspi Phone Rings Alexa

[MisterM] is a man after our own heart. He loves to combine the aesthetic of vintage equipment with the utility of new technologies. His latest venture is AlexaPhone, which marries the nearly instantaneous retrieval and computation power of Amazon’s Alexa voice service with the look and feel of a 1970s rotary phone. Best of all, there’s no need to spin the dial and wait for it to go whirring back around. AlexaPhone is ready to take questions as soon as the handset is lifted.

Questions are transmitted through a salvaged USB VOIP phone plugged into the Pi. The user must hang up the receiver in order to trigger the search. Once Alexa has an answer, the audio comes back through a small external amplified speaker with a USB-rechargeable battery. Since the hardware is a bit atypical for Alexa, [MisterM] had a bit of trouble at first trying to query the service with a physical button until he came across this AlexaPi code.

This phone is actually a reproduction of a classic BT Trimphone, which explains the asterisk and octothorpe on the dial.  The modern internals meant that [MisterM] could take advantage of the ribbon cable coming off of the receiver hook to trigger the Pi to send the query. Watch [MisterM]’s kids put Alexa through her paces after the break.

If this has you feeling nostalgic, check out this vintage Chromecast TV we covered recently or this old Russian radio reborn as a Bluetooth speaker.

Continue reading “Retro Rotary Raspi Phone Rings Alexa”

Old-school Rotary Phone Gets GSM Upgrade

Sometimes, the answer to, “Why would you bother with a project like that?” is just as simple as, “Because it’s cool.” We suspect that was the motivation behind [Dirk-Jan]’s project to make portable versions of classic rotary telephones.

On style points alone, [Dirk-Jan] scores big. The mid-1950s vintage Belgian RTT model 56 phone has wonderful lines in its Bakelite case and handset and a really cool flip-up bail to carry it around, making it a great choice for a portable. The guts of the phone were replaced with a SIM900 GSM module coupled with a PIC microcontroller and an H-bridge to drive the ringer solenoids, along with a Li-ion battery and charger to keep it totally wireless – except for the original handset cord, of course. The video after the break show the phone in action both making and receiving calls; there’s something pleasing on a very basic level about the sound of a dial tone and the gentle ringing of the bell. And it may be slow, but a rotary dial has plenty of tactile appeal too.

Rotary-to-cell conversions are a popular “just because” project, like this conversion designed to allow an angry slam-down of the handset. The orange Siemens phone in that project is nice and all, but we really favor the ’50s look for a portable.

Continue reading “Old-school Rotary Phone Gets GSM Upgrade”

rotary cell phone

Rotary Phone Converted For Mobile Use

As a society we are moving away from land line phones while mobile devices are becoming more and more prevalent. It is not uncommon for people to only have a cell phone and completely skip out on the corded home phone. While this move may be for convenience, there is one difference between the two phone types that didn’t ring well with [Stavros]. He’s an angry phone talker and misses the ability to slam down a phone handset. Now [Stavros] could just have a corded home phone but he wanted a mobile option for handset slams so he came up with a project called iRotary. It’s an old school rotary phone converted to be battery powered and uses cell phone networks for making calls.

At the heart of the project is an Arduino. The Arduino is a great choice as it can easily decode the phone’s rotary dial pulses. The Arduino code takes all of the individual dialed numbers and combines them into a phone number. The sketch is set up so that after the 10th digit is read, the phone call is placed using an off the shelf GSM shield and associated library.

Since a battery would be necessary to make this phone mobile, one was installed inside the case along with a charging circuit. [Stavros] hasn’t done any long-term endurance studies but he has had the phone on for several hours at a time without any problems. So, now he can rest easy knowing that an angry hang-ups are never out of his reach, regardless of where he may be. And since he’s a nice guy, he’s made the source code available for anyone wanting to make something similar.

Continue reading “Rotary Phone Converted For Mobile Use”

Convert A Rotary Phone To VOIP Using Raspberry Pi

There’s something so nostalgic about the rotary phone that makes it a fun thing to hack and modernize. [Voidon] put his skills to the test and converted one to VoIP using a Raspberry Pi. He used the RasPi’s GPIO pins to read pulses from the rotary dial – a functional dial is always a welcome feature in rotary phone hacks. An old USB sound card was perfect for the microphone and handset audio.

As with any build, there were unexpected size issues that needed to be worked around. While the RasPi fit inside the case well, there was no room for the USB power jack or an ethernet cable, let alone a USB power bank for portability. The power bank idea was scrapped. [voidon] soldered the power cord to the RasPi before the polyfuse to preserve the surge protection, used a mini-USB wifi dongle, and soldered a new USB connector to the sound card. [Voidon] also couldn’t get the phone’s original ringer to work, so he used the Raspberry Pi’s internal sound card to play ringtones.

The VoIP (SIP) was managed by some Python scripting, available at GitHub. [voidon] has some experience in using Asterisk at his day job, so it will be interesting to see if he incorporates it in the future.

[via Reddit]