Show HN: Rotary Phone Project (opens in new tab)

Very cool project. I was really struck by this comment:

> Dial out to a short list of family contacts. It's not something I think about much, but when I was a kid there was a phone on the wall and once I could reach it, I could use it. Now, if you're not old enough to have a cell phone, you also can't call anyone at all.

That's not something I've ever thought about, but is a really huge change in what kids can do. I was always allowed to call over to a friend's house and see if they could play.

As a child growing up in the UK I was allowed to call up, each evening, the bedtime stories phone line run by British Telecom. I used to call that bedtime story phone line from an an old 1970's era rotary Snoopy telephone from British Telecom which I still own.

I ever so carefully updated the phone with a new RJ-30 jack (the original was bare wires), so that in a custom built base that the phone sits on is an Nvidia Jetson running an LLM and trained on Charlie Brown's voice and a voice recognition model.

Dialing 1 will answer questions about Snoopy and Peanuts history and Charles Schultz in Charlie Brown's voice. You can just talk to it. Dial 2 and a very nice lady with a British accent will read you a bedtime story, interactively, like a choose your own adventure of sorts, from a large database of stories. Dial 3 and Lucy will pick up, announce that the therapist is in, and talk with you about what's troubling you, again, voice recognition and an LLM. Dial 4 and you get Woodstock. Any other number gets you an "adult" from the Peanuts cartoon that is impossible to understand, again, voice recognition to understand what you're asking, but the response is unintelligible.

Nice project! Our house has something similar. Every room has its own rotary phone, with its own number (usually someone's birthday!). I think we have 7 or 8 total. They can't dial out or anything fancy like that, but they can all call each other. The kids mostly use it to call and ask us to bring snacks when they're playing, and we mostly use it to call them and ask them to come to dinner!

Nice, and the Grandstream adapter is good to know about. There is a gadget now called cell2jack that lets you use your old land phone as a mobile handset but going to VoIP is also interesting.

Quite a while ago, Sparkfin sold a rotary phone that had been modified to have a mobile phone board inside, but it is now long obsolete:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/287

I still have an old rotary phone around, with the carbon granule mic those things had. It sounds awful. Idk whether that's due to its age, or because those mics just sounded bad compared with modern condenser mics.

I have been thinking of getting a cell2jack to have a pseudo-landline at mom's, since there are people there who get confused by smart phones.

This board also looks promising:

https://www.keyestudio.com/products/keyestudio-raspberry-pi-...

Unfortunately GSM modules in that style no longer work because the 2g and 3g networks are now shut down around here.

For my mother's 80th birthday I put a little computer in an old rotary phone.

I purchased a mobile phone number for a month with voicemail and set the voicemail to email me the messages.

I asked all her friends and family to call the number and leave a message saying something meaningful to mum and wishing her happy birthday.

I uploaded all the messages to an sd card and put the little computer in the phone and wired it up to the rotary dialer and wrote some python code which listened to the rotary dialer and played an mp3 on specific numbers.

Dialling a number played back a message from a friend/family member.

I later did the same thing for another family member but this time in an old radio and you could tune to different messages.

I got the idea from Caroline Buttet who has some really creative and interesting things on her channel, such as a peephole that shows random open security cameras and a world globe that plays local radio stations when you touch a country.

https://www.youtube.com/@carolinebuttet7095

> my 4 year old son ... loves the subway, and is already pretty proficient at using a unix terminal to query the status of different trains

Regardless of everything else there, I found this amazing

I really want to link up a ships telegraph across the offices and kitchen to request/coordinate drinks as we're working from home separately. getting ahold of them are like a grand each, but much for a joke.

I wonder if one could build a bidirectional rotary dial, so that the higher digits don’t have to take so much time. ;)

Now I wonder if any of the existing 4G gateways support pulse dialing.

My son _loves_ the train status aspect and I'm happy to oblige as it gives me an excuse to hack, but as other people point out you can get a lot of mileage out of even just getting a landline. Or you could probably connect the Grandstream directly to Twilio or another low-cost VoIP provider for cheaper than a land line and keep the ability to limit which phone numbers can be used.

The project was delayed for a day for lack of a phone cable. (of all of the weird old cables I have somehow rj-11 is no longer one of them...) I considered buying one off Amazon but it felt incredibly wasteful, so instead I asked our IT department at work. Almost any office will have piles of these things sitting around collecting dust.

If you ever get the opportunity to visit "this museum is (not) obsolete" in the UK it has an excellent room with a working analog phone exchange. You can dial rotary phones around the place and watch the switching machines come alive, see the tape loops play back system messages, etc etc its really cool. Plus its right next to the micro museum

> Instead we need some way to tell a new joke each time.

Simple. After presenting the caller with a joke, ask the caller to tell a joke of their own — without the punchline, press # when done. Record joke. Then tell caller to tell the punchline, press # when done. Record punchline.

No one would possibly abuse that, right?

Hell yes, I've been wanting to do this for years - maybe I'll finally pull the trigger and hook this up so my child can harass me telephonically after she's supposed to be in bed and asleep. :)

This is a cool project. It would be really powerful if you could integrate Home Assistant's voice assist into this. I haven't played with it much, but I believe you can create custom sentences which would probably help with the joke telling. Or I think you can even set ChatGPT as the backend which seems like it'd make some of this stuff a lot easier (like reformatting the train times). And this would enable speech to text so you wouldn't have to mess with a phone tree and mapping dialed numbers to letters.

This page lists 9 ATAs that support pulse dialing:

https://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=20...

  - Minitar MVA11A
  - Grandstream HT502
  - Grandstream GXW-4008
  - Primus Lingo iAN-02EX
  - Innomedia MTA6328-2Re
  - Motorola VT-1005
  - Audio Codes MP-114 FXO
  - Digium IAXy s101i
  - Linksys RTP300 (maybe)

I like this, especially since I've hacked around with old phones myself in the past. However, one catch. Child entertainment based on vastly complex technology in the background becomes a maintenance liability when something intricate breaks but the child wants their toy to stay working right now. Ask me how I know...

Nice! I started a similar project with a rotary phone a couple years ago with asterisk (just to the point of making a test call). Wish I had heard about the Windstream device, I ended up getting a pulse to tone converter and a PAP2T to voipify it, but those seemed to work. If I decide to pick it back up again I will check out your scripts.

Wow, this is really cool, thanks for sharing. I've always liked the idea of a home phone, rather than personal phone, for all sorts of things that belong to the house and not me personally. This pushes it one step further, will definitely try it!

I straight out put RISC-V board into the retro-looking landline phone from ebay. Some soldering, a gpio-matrix keyboard (mine is a keypad and not a real pulse rotary) and baresip integration and it kinda works.

Fantastic project. I have an itch to turn a fax machine into a "facts machine" by pairing it with Alexa and programming it to only print out factual statements.

That's very nice.

--- You don't need an Asterisk server for basic things.

You can connect HT8xx directly to a VOIP provider.

Some VOIP providers like voip dot ms let you create extensions too.

Very cool and fun project! Thanks for sharing.