With the gravitas of [Michael Douglas] in wall street and the technological amazement of [Zach Morris] on saved By The Bell, the classic 1980s ‘brick’ cell phone has a lot to offer these days. Not only is it large enough to be used as a blunt weapon, it’s also beneficial as an anchor and a lot more long lasting than an old-school Nokia. Most, if not all of these phones have gone silent considering that analog cellular service went dead a few years ago, but that didn’t stop [Andrew] from bringing his back to life.
The core of this build is a 128×64 OLED screen that replaced the old seven-digit, seven-segment display and a very small GSM module. The ancient PCB was discarded and a new hardware revision was created in Eagle based on an Arduino-powered microcontroller. The buttons from the original phone remained, thanks to a custom-made created resistive button footprint on the PCB and a bit of conductive ink.
What’s unusual is this phone actually works. [Andrew] can not only receive texts on his phone, but also send them using his own implementation of a number pad keyboard. It’s an amazing build, and from what we can tell, the first proper diy cell phone we’ve ever seen. about time someone got around to that, and we couldn’t have hoped for a better form factor.