Some guys get all the break. [Guy Dupont] It was an honor to create a functional, interactive wall-mounted landline phone for the red carpet premiere of a particular TV show. The phone must be an Easter egg in an 80’s style pizzeria set. The phone will ring almost every two minutes, and anyone brave enough to answer will be greeted with a fake pizza order, a message from an old answering machine, or a clip of The Show That Can’t Be Mentioned.
So the phone doesn’t work, but the nostalgia is strong – if the phone doesn’t ring, the receiver picks up the dial tone, and pushes the button to a busy signal. Those old fun-but-hard operator recordings would have been great, but there was just so much time. (Your call cannot be completed as dial. Check the numbers and try again.)
[Guy] The DTMF uses a SparkFun RP2040 to handle input from the keypad and to play receiver ear tones, dials and busy signals and various recordings.
Instead of tampering with the original ringer and the high voltage required to operate the bell, [Guy] The ring uses a small speaker to play the sound. Everything runs on eight AAs stuck under the keypad, down to 5V.
The project was built under fairly dramatic pressure, which makes the build video even more exciting to watch after the break. In just five days to work the phone and mail, [Guy] Hiding on the floor of his office, his messy mid-range shelter from a house haunted by Covid. Unfortunately, the whole pizzeria thing fell apart, so [Guy]His phone will not have its moment on the red carpet. But at least it’s on the site that reads black and white and all.
[Guy] Not unfamiliar with old technology / new spec games. Remember when he gave Spotify an iPod Classic shoe?