Red phone operator bot project#

Last tended 2026-02-10

red phone faceplate view

Faceplate view of the phone with all LEDs intentionally lit

red phone cover off view

Cover-off view of the phone

A new trend in wedding receptions is to have a vintage-looking phone, by which guests can leave a message of well wishes. My daughter and her fiancée challenged me to make a one-of a kind variant for their special day.

Here is a quick outline of the completed project:

  • Built upon a late 70's Western Electric touchtone phone
    • Salvaged (and re-integrated) components
      • keypad
      • handset coiled cord
      • handset earpiece
      • handset cradle switch (indicates on/off hook)
      • housing and chasis
    • New/modern components
      • Omni-directional electrical condenser microphone (as handset mic)
      • Libre Computer AML-S905X-CC single board computer with 128GB eMMC storage
      • Sabrent USB Sound Adapter (for mic input and handset earpiece output)
      • Various LEDs, resistors, and capacitors needed to integrate components
    • 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 couple

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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