For quite a while now, I've been wanting to make a sweet replacement for the red phone. Fortunately, my good buddy found a fancy phone with a broken dialer and put it on my porch. All that was needed was a bit of hot glue and solder.

The Build

1. strip it down and tear it apart! (this is my favorite part)
2. put it back together with just a few of the original pieces
3. always skip step 3
4. find a speaker (this is the sister of the speaker in the toaster)
5. glue the speaker in place and solder a bunch of wires
6. plug the phone into a computer

What it does

When the phone handset is in the phone cradle, the two internal switches are open. One switch is connected to the microphone and this means that the microphone is only active when the handset is removed from the cradle.

The second switch is in parallel with the internal speaker (which is in series with the handset speaker). This way, when the phone is lifted, the internal speaker is effectively "off".

Much to my displeasure, the internal speaker is far quieter than I had hoped, and the audio quality of the phone's stock microphone leaves much to be desired.

Oh well, I still dig it. Now I need to record some audio using this thing... and give it a name.

Hack on!