Originally published at: Rotary phone repurposed with a Raspberry Pi | Boing Boing
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Powering the bell is a nice touch. You have to careful dealing with voltages and inductances with a delicate Pi.
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This isn’t a full assistant project. (So far.)
He wanted to create a web-controlled device that could be used to receive messages and alerts. The telephone that was built contains a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W running JavaScript code inside the node environment, using Express to host a telephone website.
It can ring the bell, and play text-to-speech messages, under web control.
FYI, espeak has a number of regional accents, which are nicely horrible.
For the input side of the loop by voice, there are three options:
#1: A self-contained speech recognition package. I looked at Pocket Sphinx, which seemed to work well, even on a RPi1, but had just done a major version bump, and the matching Python libraries were all out of sync. Hopefully it has settled down now, and maybe I’ll finish my Zork Phone.
#2: Someone else’s web assistant, like Alexa or Google Assistant. That means an Internet connection to the mothership, a complicated setup, and quick enshittification or termination when they can’t figure out how to milk it for shareholder money. 
#3: Throw someone’s LLM AI at it. All the problems of #2, and more! Do this quick for the Internet fame of a cool retro-future project.
Alternately, write code to read the dialing pulses (or look around for it), and dial services like weather reports, internet radio stations, control lights, etc.
eta:
The 12V supply is a good pattern for non-USB-C Pis. Even if you use a 5.1V phone wall-wart, once you add a keyboard, mouse, etc, it will always turn out that the USB cable is marginal and will brown-out at the worst moment. A buck-converter right at the Pi will fix that.
Always keep 12V supplies from old routers and stuff, and for 12v-5v, the guts of a car lighter plug adapter should do.
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tomato
The stock phone photo is tomato.
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