Hello! It is my first post on this forum, I have been looking into arduino alot lately and started to wonder if it would be possible to use it to make a phone, not a mobile one, one that you plug in the wall at home via the ethernet connector.
the idea would be to use an antique candlestick phone only as the speaker, microphone and end call switch.
I would like to know if anyone ever did such a thing, or would it be easier to just take a cheap phone at the store and only replace the headset with the antique phone.
thanks in advance.
Here is the said phone, in case anyone would be curious:
yess of course, the thing is I plan of keeping all originals part that I may need to remove (speaker and microphone are more than likely non-fonctional) So I can put them back in if needed. Also I do not plan on altering the phone's outside look in any way. No one Shall notice the difference.
Also, as I plan on keeping the phone, its value does not really bother me, and if I am going to display it, might as well make it work.
This is just a microphone (probably carbon granules) and a dynamic speaker. What are you going to do for dialling the number.
This handset would have come from the time if manual switchboards so picking up the earpiece from the hood would have turned on a light in the local exchange. An operator would then have plugged your phone into a socket to connect you to the other party.
To be able to use it, you would need an external dial and suitable amplifiers to connect to the handset.
this is exactly what I intend to do, as I said in the first post. Use a standard phone, or preferably make one with arduino if possible, wich have the dial on it, and uses the switch from this old phone and its microphone and speaker. So the whole phone really would be external and this antique phone would just serve as the headset if I can say. Just like when you connect an actual headset to an office phone, you still need to dial on the phone itself.
And yess, this phone is pre-1920. Before phones where popular enough to need a dial and phone numbers, you would just pick up the speaker from the side and tell the operator who you wanted to talk to. It was connected to a ringerbox fixed to a wall that had bells attached to it to make it ring and also contained the electronics. So even when it was first made, it really only was a headset and a switch.
thanks jremington, so no arduino phone. And yess Paraquat, this is what I will do I guess, I wanted to know if I could build the phone myself instead but this seem to be more efficient overall. Thanks everyone for reading this post.