Since cell phones continuously get smaller and smaller, wouldn't it be hilarious to see someone walking down the street talking into a home phone handset? Yes; the answer is yes.

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Status:   Completed

Cell phone handset

One day around the beginning of September in 2004, I was chatting with my friend Cameron and I remember him getting excited about a student at MIT who had rigged up a home phone handset to their cell phone by fitting a cell phone earbud inside of the earpiece of the handset. I asked the obvious question — “Why…?”, and true to his personality, Cameron asked “Why not??” After that, I knew I had to make one for myself.

The build was simple enough; I just needed a home phone, an earbud/microphone combo (which I luckily had a few lying around!) and some time to tinker.

Taking a different approach from the MIT “stud” , I wanted to modify the curly phone cord that plugs into the handset so that I could use the internals of the handset, and so that the hacked cable would work with any home phone handset. It was a straightforward process to modify the cable: cut off one end of the phone cord and figure out which wires went to the speaker and which ones went to the microphone, liberate the 2.5mm phone audio plug from the earbud/microphone combo and identify its wires, then combine the audio plug and phone cord wires.

With some electrical tape holding everything in place (including my social status seeing as I was about 5 days into being a freshman at Cal Poly SLO) I ventured out and walked around the campus with my cell phone in my pocket and a nice curly cord running from my pocket to the handset. I don’t think I have ever gotten so many confused, inquisitive, excited, and confused looks (yes, there were a lot of confused looks) as I did when I walked around using the handset. It certainly was a good way to gain credibility as a freshman in college.