Summary
Do you have old landline phones laying around the house, with touchtone buttons or rotary dials? Perhaps you’d like to do something with them! [Scott Dylewski] has built hardware to let you do just that, since your local utility might have pulled down the lines already. The Analog Redial is, essentially, a “little phone system you can hack,” according to [Scott]. Plug in a phone or two, and you get the functionality of yesteryear—a dial tone, ringing, and all that. You can make calls between the phones, out via a SIP server, or use the answering machine functionality. You can play around with settings via a web interface, or even set up dial codes so your phone can control your Home Assistant setup. An ESP32-C6 does all the heavy lifting, with the aid of an ES8388 audio chip, and lets you plug in two phones for telephonic hijinks. You can even add a Bluetooth board to use your old landline as a handset for your modern smartphone. [Scott] has all the files on GitHub if you’d like to make one yourself, and you can get most of it pre-assembled by a board house if that’s your jam. It hardly gets easier than this. We’ve featured other fun projects that repurpose old phones for new purposes, too. If you’re whipping up telecommunications witchery of your own in the home lab, be sure to notify our tipsline. Happy phonery! Cool! This idea was in my “projects-to-do-once-Icanfindthetime”-list. I was going to settle for bluetooth though. This is neat and if it is compatible with old school ringers which needs weird voltages (60-90VAC) it could become incredibly awesome. It is, it has a SLIC onboard that does the conversion. (Source – I’ve made something very similar) In some early telephone systems we didn’t use RJ11 but proprietary plug similar to British BS1363 (but with 5 pins) like this one: https://leptiforgerom.fr/img/p/1/2/9/129-large_default.jpg The post by rasz_pl contains a link to a porn image. Unfortunately, the “report” functionality seems to have been disabled. What do you mean bro? It’s just my github repo with Sigrok plugins. Mouse over shows where the link takes, I ain’t clicking that OOooh indeed. Indeed it does. That link does not go where it says it does. Great! I can see myself dialing 121 to turn the sauna on for 2 hours or 131 for three hours in one hour from now! I’ll have a look at this. I have an on and off project for about 10 years to do exactly this (or let’s say the HFP part for 1 phone of it). I personally am aiming for the ESP (classic) doing the HFP but maybe I’ll should just use this and have it working instead :p You do need bluetooth classic for the HFP – I’m a bit sad the newer ESP32s don’t have support for iit. Unfortunately yes. I’m also hoping that at some point we get new ones supporting classic, or, that a widely available and implemented BLE alternative comes to existence Neat! Will it run Asterisk (https://www.asterisk.org/)? I wonder about combining this with a mesh network to have a decentralised wireless off-grid phone system, where you can just plug in any old landline into a node and have it jump on the network. It’s got Bluetooth and assuming that the web interface is probably via WiFi , perhaps this ESP variant also has the SDR capabilities? Similar things have already been done (see the “Mesh Potato” https://villagetelco.org/mesh-potato/). We need more hackable, mesh-networked, wired telephone management devices; I can think of several good use-cases, and a ton of “what-if” projects. Going up to 16 and being able to daisy chain…thats all i need to connect the entire family on landline again! This would be a great way to make use of my batphone red Western Electric model 500 and an old (wooden ringer box!) Kellogg desk phone, instead of just using them for display items.
