The 80s Called: They Say This DIY Phone Is

Like more than a few of us, [Kevin Noki] is sick of being pulled out of flow state by that annoyingly addictive black rectangle we all carry around. The 80s Called: They Say This DIY Phone Is, Like, Totally Rad. His solution was to build a phone to escape his phone, in a YouTube video we embedded down below.

We’d say that phone is straight out of the 1980s, except it’s not quite a phone. It would perhaps be more accurate to say he’s building a Bluetooth handset– actual telephony remains the province of a professional device with regulatory approval, because getting custom hardware on VoLTE is a nonstarter in many places. He starts out using an ESP32, because he already had one and why not.

Alas, audio quality he was getting through it was a little too crunchy, so he pivoted to use a dedicated Hands Free Profile (HFP) bluetooth module that is purpose built for exactly this kind of application. He’s selling the design on his website, but given how much detail he shows on screen, recreating your own version would be easy enough to save the quid. You’d be missing out on the STL for the fantastic 80s brick he’s made, which may be the most interesting part of the build to us.