Raspberry Pi in Rotary Phone(instructables.com) |
Raspberry Pi in Rotary Phone(instructables.com) |
- As the creator of this music phone I had hoped to keep the original mic and speaker. This turned out to be more work than I was willing to do as those were both 24V devices, not suitable for Rpi integration without extra electronics.
- I also had hoped to keep the original handle chord. This also turned out to to be impossible as the original mic and speakers shared a common 24V+. So 3 wires in total in the chord, I needed 4 for the new mic and speaker.
- I also ripped out most of the ringer mechanics, but kept the bells. The bells are now hit with a piece of heat shrink tube on the end of a small motor.But what would I hack together for the software side of that?
The other option would be to get a real copper phone line.
My reasoning is that a real emergency may include a power outage. Relying on some cool hack isn't going to be helpful when your child is trying to reach out to you when there is no power at home.
Even if you provide backup power to the router is not enough, since at the other end, VDSL cabinets in the street, there is no backup power, so if it's not a blackout of only your house but it insist the local transformer, the VDSL cabinet is probably out of power too and thus no line.
The only reliable solution is 4G that is not so reliable since in case of emergency lines get overloaded.
I probably should get an ham radio license to be safe...
The same device can also be configured to use a VoIP provider and with all the configurability of it I bet you can get it to auto-dial when you take the phone off the hook. edit: it looks like yes it is doable https://community.cisco.com/t5/atas-gateways-and-accessories...
It ends up not becoming the emergency phone and more 'remind xyz to grab abc on the way home' phone but oh well :)
Check PMR446 (EU), FRS (US) and similar services.
But I guess using VoIP software it's not a new idea: https://github.com/hnesland/aselektriskbureau
It would be neat to enable dialing, e.g. "1" for Mom, "2" for Dad...
Another similar project: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/
I kept the speakers and all intact and it still sounds fine. I loaded it up with some fairytale stories, 1 for each single number you can dial.
I'm guessing the dialer part should be "simple" as I could probably connect an Arduino as if it were a keyboard but can't find much on the audio part.