Purdue Hackers wanted a better way for people to request access to the Hack Night venue than pressing a doorbell. We decided on the idea of two phones that could talk to each other so people could call the inside and ask to be let in.

I found two rotary phones at an antiques store and decided to buy them. After disassembling them and figuring out their internal wiring, I designed a custom PCB to connect all the parts of the phone to a Raspberry Pi. I then wrote a custom application that allowed the phones to connect together with WebRTC and a central server to manage the calls going on. After that, people were able to call from the door of our venue to ask someone to let them in.