Building Alexa into a Rotary Phone
How I built an Alexa-powered rotary phone with a Raspberry PI and some LEDs
8 min readJun 21, 2019
TL;DR — I built Alexa into a rotary phone and setup the rotary dialer to trigger actions on my other Alexa devices.
Parts required
- an old rotary phone
- a Raspberry PI 3
- a bread board (used in development)
- a USB mic (dismantled and rewired)
- a 1/8" mono patch cable (rewired)
- a couple of LEDs
- three 10k resistors
How it came to be
Our family uses Alexa on a daily basis for things like playing music, getting the weather, and setting timers so the kids don’t fight over toys. For a handful of tasks, we prefer it to our mobile phones.
But there’s still some points of friction with the way she fits into our household:
- I hate yelling at her
With a two young boys at home, there’s never a shortage of chaos and clamor in our open living room / kitchen where Alexa lives. I hate yelling over all that noise from across the room, especially when she’s already talking or playing music.
