I’ve got an old house and like to have period-appropriate decor in some rooms, and I was inspired by an earlier article in Boing Boing about a design group building Amazon Echos into antique phones. So here’s my new phone project, which is just about complete:
I used an Echo Input for the project, which is a thinner version of the echo dot without a built in speaker. They’re nice and cheap, but I found that it was next to impossible to work on. The built in microphones are teeny tiny PCB surface-mount units and I figured there was no was I could solder wires to them without likely destroying the unit. Same thing for the indicator LED. So I went all analog Rube-Goldberg on the thing. I made a circuit with a light sensor and relay, so that when the LED goes on it triggers a retro looking bulb on top of the phone. I used parts from a stethoscope to remote the microphone input to the phone’s original microphone housing. And I wired the audio output through the original phone’s receiver switch so that when you pick up the receiver you hear the sound through that, and when you hang it up the sound goes to speakers in the old radio below the phone.
