I had a little fun and threw together something I always wanted to do.
Back in the day, we used these massive handsets with our land line telephones. They had just the right amount of heft and a design that allows you to ’shoulder’ the handset. You can still find them in hotels and attached to payphones.
Today our cellphones are tiny, light, and too slim to shoulder. So, with a nostalgic wisp I decided to pack a cell phone into the handset of an old rotary telephone.
It was a short build and I ended up packing a bluetooth ear piece into the enclosure instead of a full, outright wireless mobile phone. This way, there’s no need to get a separate phone account or swap out SIM cards.
The build was basic. I simply cracked open the bluetooth headset, saw what was inside, and did some simple soldering to extend the wires for the ear speaker and surprisingly tiny microphone. I also soldered a header connection on the microphone wire since it would be useful to disconnect the device from the handset without having to re-thread everything.
After packing everything up, it worked like a charm. However, it was lacking one important element; the proper weight. Since the old massive mouthpiece microphone and old ear speaker were tossed aside, the balance and heft were off.
I wandered around my home looking for good ballast and turned up a handful of pennies. These were stuffed into the handset, along with some packing foam to keep the electronics and coins from jingling. Once that was done, I had a blast chatting away on my new cell phone ‘handset’.
After mentioning this project to a friend, he explained how he pictured me with the handset driving down the road. “That’s not gonna work. It would be illegal in California.” So, we both chuckled and explained how it could be strapped to my head with a sweat band. With that image in mind, I couldn’t help but envision being pulled over by a policeman with it stuck to my head and saying with a wink, “What seems to be the problem officer?”