{"id":2446,"date":"2025-03-25T05:22:08","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T05:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uselesspickles.com\/portfolio\/?page_id=2446"},"modified":"2025-05-22T19:11:14","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T19:11:14","slug":"vintage-car-phone-bluetooth-conversion","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.uselesspickles.com\/portfolio\/vintage-car-phone-bluetooth-conversion\/","title":{"rendered":"Vintage Car Phone Bluetooth Conversion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Vintage Car Phone Bluetooth Conversion<\/h1>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Bringing Obsolete Technology Back to Life<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I have a vintage car phone in my 1993 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4<\/a>. It’s pretty cool, but it can’t make\/receive calls because it relies on old 1G analog cellular service that has been extinct in the US since 2008. I wanted to make it functional so that I could actually use it for phone calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I could have taken the lazy approach and simply hacked a Bluetooth headset into the handset, wired up to the speaker and microphone. But I really wanted the full genuine experience of using the original car phone: the display, the button beeps, dialing a number and pressing “SEND” to place a call, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I chose the most extreme and difficult approach: reverse engineer the car phone so that I could take complete control of the handset with custom electronics and microcontroller programming, replicate much of the original behavior from scratch, and integrate with a Bluetooth module so that calls can be routed through a modern cell phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a quick demo and disassembly video of my latest prototype:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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