When this thing is finished, an old Motorola T900 two-way pager will send Meshtastic messages over LoRa, text through an Android phone's normal number via Bluetooth, and chat over Wi-Fi with other converted T900s. Right now the prototype already runs Meshtastic on a Heltec V4 board with an ESP32-S3 and an SX1262, and the original screen shows a menu with MailBox and Send Message plus a status line reading Bluetooth connected. That milestone was hit the same day the project was shared, which makes it even more fun to follow.
The standout detail is that the original LCD and QWERTY keyboard, roughly 25 years old, now work under ESP32-S3 control. There was basically no documentation for either, so the maker sniffed and traced the original hardware to reverse engineer how Motorola drove the display and keys. The case, screen and EL backlighting all stay, and the plan is to reuse the high-voltage EL lighting for both the LCD and keyboard.
Construction-wise, the current prototype is a black microcontroller board wired to a green PCB, and the maker admits the wiring is messy because most effort so far went into cracking the LCD and keyboard. Loops of wire left in place for the EL inverter are already soldered onto the ribbon cables. A future single board would pack the ESP32-S3, SX1262, GPIO expander, Li-ion charging, EL inverter and vibration and piezo drivers, with matching contact pads so the swap needs no soldering.
Open questions remain: whether Android and Apple allow Bluetooth texting the way the maker wants, and whether the drop-in PCB happens depends on community interest. Ringtone work is underway, and no repository is public yet.