Comment by andrewstuart

For my mother's 80th birthday I put a little computer in an old rotary phone.

I purchased a mobile phone number for a month with voicemail and set the voicemail to email me the messages.

I asked all her friends and family to call the number and leave a message saying something meaningful to mum and wishing her happy birthday.

I uploaded all the messages to an sd card and put the little computer in the phone and wired it up to the rotary dialer and wrote some python code which listened to the rotary dialer and played an mp3 on specific numbers.

Dialling a number played back a message from a friend/family member.

I later did the same thing for another family member but this time in an old radio and you could tune to different messages.

I got the idea from Caroline Buttet who has some really creative and interesting things on her channel, such as a peephole that shows random open security cameras and a world globe that plays local radio stations when you touch a country.

https://www.youtube.com/@carolinebuttet7095