Use weeBell to Create Your Own Local Landline Telephone Service
Dan Julio created weeBell, which is hardware that lets you create your own telephone service to take advantage of old landline phones.
Residential landline is experiencing its death throes and even commercial operations tend to rely on various kinds of VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) services. That means that there are literal mountains of useless POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phones with no use littering our homes and thrift stores. Wouldn't it be nice if they could serve a new purpose? If you think so, then you'll want to check out Dan Julio's weeBell project that gives you the hardware necessary to create your own local telephone service that you can use for a variety of purposes.
Traditional analog two-wire landline telephones can't do much of anything on their own. Their internal circuitry only lets them receive analog audio, transmit analog audio, and generate tones. The telephone service provider is responsible for everything else, including connecting calls with other telephones. weeBell consists of hardware and software that lets you become the provider, so you can utilize old phones for new purposes. You could, for instance, setup weeBell to work with a VoIP service or with your cell phone. Or you could get more creative and use weeBell for something like an escape room puzzle or an art piece.
There are two major pieces of hardware needed for weeBell to work: the gCore development board and the gCore POTS shield. Julio designed both of them. The gCore development board contains an ESP32 microcontroller, a TFT touchscreen LCD, battery charging circuitry, and more. The gCore POTS shield handles the physical connection. You can plug a telephone line directly into the gCore POTS shield or you can connect it to a building's existing phone wiring to utilize up to three telephones plugged into the jacks.
From there, everything is software. The two gCore boards will allow phones to talk to anything on the local network, the wider internet, or devices connected to the ESP32 via Bluetooth. Unfortunately, Julio hasn't yet uploaded details about the different software options that he has developed or plans to develop. There are many possibilities, so we're excited to see where this project goes.
For the time being, you can purchase Julio's gCore development board on Tindie for $99.95. Then you'll be ready to start dialing when the gCore POTS shield and accompanying software become available.
