Turning A Phone Into A Media Center Remote

May 20, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

[Kees] wanted a remote for an XBMC audio system. He had a classic T65 Dutch telephone in one of his project boxes and thought this phone with the addition of a Raspberry Pi he could have a functional media remote with classic lines and 70s styling.

Each of the digits on the phone were wired up to a small solderless breadboard. With a handful of resistors, [Kees] set up a simple pull up/pull down circuit feeding in to his Raspi’s GPIO input.

With a short Python script, [Kees] managed to map the buttons to XMBC’s play/pause, volume up/down, next, and previous commands. There were a few buttons left over, so those were mapped to online radio stations, playlists, and a strange setting known only as ‘moo’. We’re not sure what that button does, but you can see the other functions of this XMBC phone remote in action in the video below.

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Getting Rid Of Telemarketers With A Banana Phone

February 1, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 78 Comments

Banana

The Federal Trade Commission really doesn’t like robocalls and other telephone solicitors selling you vinyl siding or home security upgrades. The FTC is even offering $50,000 to anyone who can do away with these robocalling telemarketers, and [Alex] looks like he might just claim the prize. He developed The Banana Phone, a device that eliminates those pesky telemarketers.

The basic idea of the Banana Phone is requiring callers to enter a four-digit pass code (played via text to speech over a relevant song to prevent a bot from getting through) before connecting them to the main line. Once a caller has been verified as human, their number is added to a white list so they won’t have to listen to [Raffi] every time they call.

The Banana Phone uses off-the-shelf parts including a Raspberry Pi and a phone/Ethernet adapter with the total build cost under $100. You can check out a demo of the Banana Phone in action after the break starting at about 2:25.

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GSM To Landline Box Has A Creatively Soldered Cellphone Inside

January 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

gsm-to-landline-box-teardown

We don’t blame the manufacturer of this GSM to Landline converter box for not designing the thing from the ground-up. After all, quantities of scale have made dumb-cellphones available for next to nothing. But you have to admit that it’s interesting to see a fully populated cellphone board creatively soldered into a consumer product. It would be commonplace if made in your basement rather than being sold in a store.

[Anton] was using the box to add his analog house phones to the cell network. The signal strength at home is pretty low and this box offers an external antenna for better reception. He cracked open the case expecting to see a GSM modem and was surprised to see the cellphone board. It includes a battery backup, and has been soldered directly to the cables which interface with the main PCB using some SIL connectors. Those solder joints were done by hand directly to the pins of the SIM card slot and as well as all of the other important connection points.

Find A Way To Stop Robocalls To Grab This $50k Prize

October 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 111 Comments

Here’s a challenge tailored to our community if we’ve ever seen one. You know those delightful unsolicited prerecorded calls you get from time to time? They might be political, but they also come from companies trying to sell you vinyl siding, or promising improvements in your business. Well they’re against the law in many cases, and complaints to the Federal Trade Commission have been piling up. So now the FTC is offering a $50,000 bounty to anyone who can find a way to block the calls.

It’s called the Robocall Challenge and you’ve got until January 17th, 2013 to get your entry submitted. The great thing is, this doesn’t need to be a fully working solution. Your entry may be: “proposed technical solutions or functional solutions and proofs of concept “. Even better, you retain ownership of the solution even if you win. This type of recognition will surely have telco related companies beating a path to your door.

Of course if you do have a solution, we’d love to hear about it too!

[Thanks Filespace via WCPO]

Rotary And Cordless Phones Mashup

September 7, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This pile of hardware marries telecommunications hardware from distinctly different generations. [Andrew D. Farquharson] wanted the retro look and operation of a rotary phone, with the convenience of a modern cordless. He combined the two technologies to achieve his goal.

The first problem was to find a way to translate the rotary inputs to something he could use. There are already a bunch of projects that use rotary hardware so he didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. He followed this guide to connecting Arduino to a rotary phone.

The next step was to interface with his cordless phone. He ditched the case and soldered rainbow ribbon cable to the entire button matrix. An opto-isolator is used to protect the Arduino while making each connection. Finally, he patched into the mechanism which monitors the cradle to see if the handset has been picked up. It sounds like his code lets you enter the number on the dial, then pick up the handset to actual transmit it through the cordless phone.

Using Old Phones As An Intercom In Your VW Bus (or Anywhere Else)

June 8, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 68 Comments

In case you haven’t noticed from my many comments on the subject, I drive a VW bus. It is a 1976 Westfalia camper with sage green paint and green plaid upholstery. I absolutely love it and so does the rest of my family. We go for drives in the country as well as camping regularly. We have found that the kids have a hard time communicating with us while we’re going higher speeds. These things aren’t the quietest automobiles in the world. Pushing this bread loaf shaped hunk of steel down the road with an engine that might top out at 75hp results in wind noise, engine noise, and of course, vibration.

I decided to employ a really old hack to put two functional telephones in the bus so my kids can talk to my wife (or whoever the passenger is) without screaming quite so loud. This hack is extremely easy, fairly cheap, and can be done in just a few minutes. The result is a functional intercom that you could use pretty much anywhere!

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Ethernet Over Telephone Wire

April 18, 2012 by Mike Szczys 83 Comments

When [Bobo1on1] upgraded his Internet connection from ADSL to Fiber he ran into an issue of actually getting that speed to his desktop computer though his LAN setup. Before he had been using a telephone extension wire which ran from where the DSL entered the house, through a splitter, to his computer where the modem was located. Now that the router used by the fiber system is located at teh entry point, he has no easy way to run Ethernet cable to his computer room. Wifi is predictably slower than the 50mbit WAN connection, and he was unable to use the telephone cable as Ethernet directly.

The solution turns out to be a pair of TP-Link home plug adapters. These are designed to use your home’s mains wiring for data transfer. But [Bob] rigged it up so that they can push 224 mbits/sec over the telephone wire. Since you can’t run mains voltage through the telephone wire he had to hack a method to separate power for the devices from the data I/O. This was done with an external power supply and some passive components for filtering. The drawback is that this is half-duplex so up/down communications cannot happen at the same time.