The Phone of Positivity

by Tom Sparrow

I came across an old military field phone for sale in a junk shop and loved the look of the phone,. However, I wanted the phone to be functional in an interesting way and no just something to look at.

So after speaking to Mike, he gave me the brilliant idea of having the phone speak inspirational quotes. We discussed how we could go about doing this and decided to buy and mp3 module that could be triggered via a set of buttons on the phone.

So I took the MP3 module and soldered the speaker output pads to the handset of the phone, added some buttons such as play, next track/quote, pause etc. then I took an audiobook full of quotes and converted it to MP3 format, then separated each track with Audacity to have its own file which could be stored on a micro SD card and played on the MP3 module.

Nixie Clock Upgrade

After making the quote speaking phone, I decided to take the project further by adding some front-facing nixie tubes soldered to a nixie clock circuit board purchased from eBay.

I made a template of the clock, taped it into position on the phone, then drilled and filed out the oval shapes that would fit the nixie tubes. Then I wired the MP3 module and nixie clock to one USB input at the back of the phone case so one power supply could be used for both functions.

A final check to make sure all cables and connections were well insulated and safe from touching the metal phone case and then the clock was fired up. It really does look great.