A VoIP, bluetooth-connected, multimodal, home intercom enabled vintage motel payphone
Last year, my friend Bert Fan finally convinced me to buy a payphone.
We’d been commiserating for years about how we both wanted a payphone for nostalgic reasons and general elder hacker shenanigans. I didn’t really have a plan for what the hell I would use it for, so it sat on the back burner.
That changed when Bert got his and did an awesome write up on how he’d set it up as an intercom for his family.
I love teaching my kid about technology and retro electronics, so seeing Bert’s implementation was truly the inspiration I needed to finally buy one.
My son was absolutely thrilled when the phone arrived. My UPS guy, less so. I had no idea how much these things weighed until I had one delivered to my house. They’re around 60 lbs.
The payphone really ties my home office aesthetic together.
Once the payphone arrived, I collected all the necessary components and set out to copy Bert’s intercom idea. The intercom setup worked perfectly. Rather than the rad 90s translucent handset, I opted for something that conveyed the seriousness of the business at hand.
By now you may be asking yourself “but where does all of that other technological scope creep come in?” worry not, dear reader, we’ll get to that in future installments…
- Setting up RasPBX
- Getting Twilio’s SIP service to work
- Using RasPBX as an intercom service
- Setting up 2-digit aliases for wast toddler dialing
- Using the Payphone as an audio input for Zoom
- Using Cell2Jack to use the payphone as a bluetooth device
I’ll try to keep these short and to the point.
Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll follow along in my first actual attempt to blog 🥳
