Last year I bought an old telephone (made in about 1895) from an auction.
It was of course completely incompatible with modern phone systems so I removed the insides, threw in a Raspberry-Pi and converted it into a mobile phone. The original handset works for the sound and microphone too.
I squeezed in a GSM hat (which holds a SIM card), a USB speaker and a UPS card.
I managed to connect it to the rotary dial with the existing wires directly onto the Pi GPIO and write code to convert the pulses into digits that I could send to the SIM card to dial with.
The speaker is there to play an mp3 sound of an old telephone ringing.
I also got a bit carried away and added speed-dial (dial 2 and then the digit of the person you want)
If the code recognises the number it will speak the person's name whilst ringing.
I then got even more carried away (possibly after a beer or two !) and added dialing combinations to play different internet radio stations through the USB speaker (so I can look even more bizarre whilst out and about with it).
I also added a website that you can connect to which shows you a log of incoming and outgoing calls.
I added a port at the back so it can be connected to a USB battery for calls longer than the UPS will allow (20 mins).
I used mpg321 to play the mp3 files, it is installed by doing this:-
sudo apt-get -y install mpg321
I used http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/ to create the mp3 files.
Here's a basic map of how it connects together:-
I have attached the code that controls it all, hopefully it'll help anyone who is wanting to do something similar or wanting to know how to play internet radio or make mobile calls from a Raspberry-Pi etc.
It is of course very heavy, totally impractical and quite embarrassing to use in public…. but I had a laugh building it and have a laugh using it too :-)
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