Reverse Engineering a Cold War Military Telephone

Join Nick and Rob as we reverse engineer the protocol of a vintage 1980s digital military telephone (the TA-1042) and reimplement a phone switch to convert some door stops into useful phones! Curious? The Discord: The TA-1042 is a quite slick looking military phone that uses the CVSD audio codec and a proprietary switching protocol. The project implements a hat for the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) cortex M0 microcontroller that leveraged the Programmable I/O (PIO subsystem) to encode/decode data from differential Manchester encoding provided by the phone. The entire project is open source! Future videos are planned with more details on the implementation. If you’d like an assembled version head on over to Tindie: Source Code: Buy a board: Rob’s write-up: