Vintage Intercom Echo

Demo

Overview

About a week ago I decided to take a stroll through our local Antique Mall. While it's filled with lots of cool stuff, this small speaker really caught my attention. It was $20 and I had no idea what I was going to do with it.

I spent about a day just thinking and finally it hit me, Amazon opened up the Alexa SDK to the Raspberry Pi a while back, I bet this thing would make a cool little Echo.

Inside I found that the electronics were incredibly simple. It was a speaker hooked up to a 2 position rotary switch. Push up the switch and it changes from a speaker to a microphone, let go and it reverts back.

I ended up wiring it so the speaker was connected to the output of a USB sound card and the switch would activate Alexa.

I used the smallest LEDs I could find because I wanted the intercom to look as stock as possible.

Wiring was pretty simple. I modified the USB hub's plug to a usb micro plug to cut down on space and a microphone was positioned right behind the speaker. Talk towards the box, push the switch up and Alexa begins listening.

Conclusions

Overall I'm extremely happy with how this build came together. It only took about a day to put it together and most of that time was spent messing around with the programming.

It even got some love from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.