Black phone operator bot project#

Last tended 2026-02-28

Sad prologue#

As you might have guessed, the black phone project is a near duplicate of the red phone project. The USPS performed an in-transit disappearing act on the red phone (as well as all other contents of the box it was in); they DID however deliver an empty, mangled fragment of said box to its destination -- with address and postage stubbornly clinging to the surviving cardboard. By this cruel humor, they deem the package to have been delivered. So we are currently in a Catch-22 saga of trying to make any postal staff whatsoever acknowledge that we truly wished for the contents of the box to make it to the destination together with the address-and-postage fragment of cardboard.

But enough about that. Our goal was still to have such a phone ready for our daughter and her fiancée's wedding. Consequently, I scoured a nearby collectibles and antiques mall and was lucky to find a faux-vintage, faux-rotary-dial, black-finish phone that could undergo nearly the same conversion -- sans the geeky LEDs. The conversion and QA/QC testing are complete as I write this, and the pics and a few details are below.

Here is the quick outline of the completed project -- much of it the same as the red phone project:

• Built upon a no-name, 80's, faux-vintage, faux-rotary-dial touchtone phone
  • Salvaged (and re-integrated) components
    • keypad
    • handset coiled cord
    • handset earpiece and microphone
    • handset cradle switch (indicates on/off hook)
    • housing and chasis
  • New/modern components
    • Libre Computer AML-S905X-CC single board computer with 128GB eMMC storage
    • Sabrent USB Sound Adapter (for mic input and handset earpiece output)
    • Various resistors, and capacitors needed to integrate the hardware to the computer
  • The handset cradle switch and the touchpad signal are integrated to the single board computer via its GPIO (input/output) pins
  • The software "brain" of the phone is written in Python
    • The phone requires a wired network connection only for 1) pulling down software updates, and 2) uploading the guest recordings to a cloud repository. It is otherwise coded to operate without network access.
• The phone provides the following options to the user:
  • Record a message for the wedding couple
  • Hear a fun sample greeting from one of the wedding couples' siblings
    • Cycle through fun sample greetings from the rest of the siblings
  • Repeat the menu
  • BONUS: be teasingly scolded if you press a non-allowed key
• For each of the prompts, the phone employs audio clips recorded by the wedding couple
• Cosmetic details:
  • The phone's plastic was in pretty good condition
  • To bring the plastic back to life in a couple spots, I polished it gently with blue jeweler's rouge on a cotton-muslin buffing wheel

For geeks who may be interested, this project is held in a GitLab repo. The repo is currently private, but I intend to de-indentify the relevant elements and then make the project public in the future. Use the site contact info or post a comment below if you have questions or wish for the project to be public sooner.

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