The Magic Phone is one of those projects that seems to either mystify people or make them say: Cool! Make me one too!

Basically, it’s two phones mounted into a vintage rotary phone. One of the phones is a wireless home phone that works on the DECT standard and the other is a cellphone. The rotary mechanism’s switches are decoded by a custom-designed circuit which then “pushes” the buttons on either of the two phones inside. The circuit is compact because it uses surface mount components and therefore can leave plenty of room inside the rotary phone for the original bells which are rung using the vibrating function of the cellphone. The DECT phone’s battery powers the circuit and the cellphone uses its own battery. If you are at O’Reilly’s EuroOSCON in Brussels next week, I will have the phone with me for the Make event on Wednesday night. I have quite a few photos up of the Magic Phone and the first part of a detailed how-to can be found on Engadget here and the second part here.