RetroBlue is a modern cell phone accessory with an old-timey feel. We took a vintage rotary phone, an Arduino board, and a Bluetooth chip and combined them to create RetroBlue, a fully functional Bluetooth accessory that can dial and receive calls via a cell phone. The user simply pairs his or her cell phone with RetroBlue and all calls are then forwarded to the unit. We worked extensively to convert the antiquated circuitry within the phone to portable battery-powered components and developed custom code and circuitry to pass calls to and from the rotary phone's hardware.
Our code, developed with Arduino 1.0.5 on an Arduino Uno, is in retroblue/. Our project report, which contains a fairly detailed description of our implementation, is in report/. A short video about our project is at http://youtu.be/ulu5tc6mviA. Check it out, if only to hear the wonderfully loud and annoying ring!
RetroBlue is a final project for Harvard University's introductory electrical engineering course, Engineering Sciences 50. We'd like to acknowledge SparkFun for their efforts in creating a Bluetooth rotary phone, and they were the inspiration for this project. Information on their phone, as well as links to a quick tutorial and some sample code, can be found at https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/8929.