JWZ of San Francisco's DNA Lounge writes, "First, I reverse engineered an old payphone and turned it into a Linux computer. This was a ridiculous thing to do and my build log is ridiculous. Second: The reason I did this was to use it as a prop at our next HACKERS party."
"It's happening on January 22 at DNA Lounge! We're again dressing the club up as Cyberdelia, the club from Hackers (with skate ramps and big-screen Wipeout and everything), but this time we're screening a different twenty year old movie: Tank Girl!"
I got a Raspberry Pi 2 B to drive it, which is probably a more powerful computer than your typical PC was at the time that this payphone was originally in service.
The Pi has an audio output, but it's shit, and it's not powerful enough to drive the speaker in this handset. But that doesn't matter since the Pi does not have an audio input, meaning I needed a different audio card anyway. I got a Cirrus Logic, which, conveniently enough, also has a TRRS headset input.
You know what this means, right? I voluntarily and of my own free will recompiled my kernel in order to get my audio card to work. I don't even know who I am any more. I don't even know what year this is. "And you did this on your home phone?"
Because of course Raspbian doesn't come with the modules pre-built. Of course it doesn't.
Anyway, after the usual jiggery-pokery, I had audio ouput via aplay and audio input via arecord and all was right with the world, except for the fact that I had hoped I would never hear the word "ALSA" again in my life. (It's "Advanced", you know. The "A" stands for "Advanced".)
My payphone runs Linux now [JWZ]
