Nixon Phone

2026

In approximately 2013, my aunt gave me a red rotary dial Western Electric Model 500 telephone for christmas. This was brought on by my having converted several similar phones to work as field telephones for use at the Boy Scout camp that I was working at in the summers. I discussed this conversion in one of the oldest pages on this website. This phone sat as mostly a tchotchke for twelve years. In 2025, I had it sitting next to a beige model 500 on my credenza and a college friend visiting made the comment that he had expected to hear Richard Nixon when he picked up the handset. I realized at that moment that I should make that reality.

As a result of Watergate, it is well known that Nixon recorded a lot of happenings in the White House. Part of the recordings included his own tapped phone lines. The quality of these recordings is variable, but some sound as good as you would have expected to have had heard if you had Nixon in the flesh connected over copper wires. These tapes have been digitized and can be downloaded from Nixon Library. With ample source material and proof of existence of ESP32 based MP3 players, I set to work.

Completed 10BASE-T1L Adapters

Hardware

In 2016, the year that I graduated from undergrad, CadSoft sold EAGLE to Autodesk. Autodesk quickly changed the subscription model from a perpetual license to a monthly or yearly recurring charge. After trying out KiCad and being bewildered by the insane separation between library symbol and footprint, I bit the bullet and paid $100 for the yearly Autodesk EAGLE subscription. I continued to pay $100 per year and likely would have in perpetuity, but Autodesk decided to discontinue EAGLE and migrate users to Fusion 360. About 2 years ago the native Linux version of Autodesk EAGLE stopped working, so I started running it in Wine

Full Duplex Transmitter Model