Ok, i have a stupid idea for a project and I was wondering if this is possible and, if so, has anyone had any luck with it?

I have an old art-deco rotary phone sitting in my room. Looks nice. I like it. It will soon be useless because I wont have a land land. However, I have an idea. Can I get a linux program to ring the phone through my modem? I thought it would be cool as hell to have the old phone ring when I receive an email, or even program it to ring the phone and play an mono audio message when the receiver is picked up.

Any ideas?

This would make for an interesting project, but, it might not be very easy, or alternatively, cheap. The telephone system works on 6-12v DC. You could easily hook up two phones, or, a phone and a modem, by cutting a standard phone line in two, and stripping out the red and green wires. Hook the green wires back together, and hook the one red a side of a 9v battery, hook the other red wire to a 300 Ohm resistor, and hook the other side of the resistor to the unused terminal of the battery. You can get a resistor from Radio Shack for a dollar or so.
This would enable you to talk back-and-forth, but the ring is a bit more complicated. It takes 90v DC at 20 Hz along the lines to make a ring. So, the only way to make it ring, is to find an old powered automatic telephone switchboard (good luck!) and hook up the phone to one line, and the modem to the other, and use the modem to simply ring the extension that the phone is on. When you pick up, the computer could play the message, and even read it to you using the Festival Text-to-Speech System.
If you get it working, I would like to know how exactly you did it, as it would be a neat addition to my site.

Have Fun!
Ian

Thanks, Ian.. now i'm getting somewhere...

So, do you think since people were making telephone switchboards back when my great grandma was my age... that it wouldnt be too hard to piece one together with the help of Radio Shack, instead of trying to find a used setup?

I don't mind putting a box together from scratch, but I want to keep this project fairly tight.

So, I drew up some vague plans on putting together a switchboard-device from scratch.

http://greendragon.centuroncomputers...phonestuff.jpg

Ian

Hi, for me to get a telephone switchboard to work I'd have to reverse engineer it, so would probably make the simplest interface possible myself. To get this to work here's a suggestion:

Use this circuit: http://www.southwest.com.au/~jfuller.../noalimba1.htm to interface the ringer.
I'd use the relay contacts to switch a wall-wart AC output that drives the ringer. Any voltage > ~25V will work, with higher voltages yielding higher ringer volume. Old ringers are usually a solenoid inside a bell so this would give 120HZ ring. Frequency multiplier/divider circuits could be used to change the freq but are not necessary. You'll have to figure out a simple code to send a 1 to the relay.

As for the speaker in the phone, I'd guess it's 16 or 32 ohms. Measure the resistance across it and get a matching transformer (i.e. from Radio Shack) to match computer speaker impedance (8 ohms) to whatever the phone speaker is. I'd suggest you just take apart the phone and wire this directly as you don't need any of the electronics in the phone and they may cause problems.