Poetry Phone — Part 4: Making It a Banana

The Banana Poetry Phone from above — The finished Banana Poetry Phone.

At this point the code was done and the phone worked great, but it still looked like a beige desk phone from 1985. The phone was going to live at Peel for the O, Miami Poetry Festival. Peel is a banana-based soft serve shop in Miami Shores and the Design District. Did you know about a third of the planet's food goes to waste, often just because of how it looks? The bananas Peel uses aren't rotten or spoiled — they're perfectly good fruit that won't sell in stores because people won't buy spotted bananas. Peel blends them into soft serve with no added sugar and just two ingredients. So yeah, the phone needed to be a banana. And not a pretty one.

Jayna and Alyssa Take Over

I handle the electronics. Sculpting and painting are not my thing. So I brought in Jayna Hankin and Alyssa Cruz. They did all the physical work on this one — the clay sculpting, the spray painting, dyeing the cord, hand-painting the brown spots. I told them I wanted it to look like a banana that's just past ripe, the kind Peel would use. Spotted, a little beat up. They nailed it.

Sculpting the Handset

Real banana next to the clay mold for reference — A real overripe banana for reference, next to the clay mold taking shape.

They grabbed a real banana, set it on the table for reference, and started building up modeling clay over the original phone handset. Matching the curve, the taper, getting the stem right.

Sculpting modeling clay over the phone handset — Sculpting the clay banana around the original handset, real banana for scale.

The hard part was keeping it functional. The earpiece and mouthpiece holes had to stay clear, and it still needed to sit in the cradle so the hook switch would work. Too much clay and it won't hang up right. The phone thinks you're permanently off-hook.

Clay banana handset resting on the phone body — The sculpted banana handset sitting on the phone body, testing cradle fit before painting.

Going Yellow

Once the sculpting was done, they needed to make the whole thing yellow. Not just the handset. The phone body, the keypad cover, the cradle, the cord. All of it.

The Phone Body

I took apart the phone shell and laid out all the pieces on cardboard for them.

Phone parts disassembled on cardboard, ready for painting — All the parts laid out for painting.

All phone parts spray painted banana yellow — Everything after a few coats of yellow.

Spray painting the banana handset yellow — Spray painting the banana handset.

The Cord

You can't spray paint a coiled phone cord. The paint cracks as soon as you stretch it. So they dyed it. Pot of yellow fabric dye on the stove.

Phone coiled cord being dyed yellow in a pot on the stove — Dyeing the cord on the stove.

The plastic took the color well. It came out slightly more golden than the spray paint, but that actually looks right. Banana stems are a different shade than the fruit.

Adding the Spots

A solid yellow banana looks fake. The whole point of this project, and the whole point of Peel, is that the ugly ones are the good ones. So Jayna and Alyssa hand-painted brown spots and bruises on the handset, using the real banana as reference. The spots cluster near the ends and along the inner curve, same places a real banana bruises.

Hand-painting brown spots onto the banana handset — Painting the overripe spots.

Holding the finished painted banana handset — Done.

Reassembly

I put the electronics back in. Pico, DFPlayer, all the wiring. It barely fits inside the now-yellow body.

Inside the finished banana phone showing Pico and DFPlayer — Pico and DFPlayer wired up inside the yellow body.

Close-up of Pico and wiring inside the banana phone — Pico on its terminal block, yellow cord coming in from the top.

Banana handset underside showing speaker and microphone holes — Speaker and mic holes still clear through the clay.

The stem even has a green tip.

The Finished Phone

Pick up the banana, get a dial tone, punch in a number, hear a poem. Dial 777-FILM and you get Poemafone. It works exactly like a real phone call, except the phone is a banana and the person on the other end is a poet.

The spotted handset fits right in at Peel. A third of the world's food gets thrown away because it doesn't look perfect. Peel takes those bananas and makes something good out of them. This phone does the same thing with an old format nobody uses anymore.

The Journey

Part 1: Cracking the keypad matrix
Part 2: Wiring the DFPlayer Mini
Part 3: Kid-proofing and Easter eggs
Part 4: Making it a banana

Credits

Banana sculpting, painting, dyeing, and full physical transformation: Jayna Hankin and Alyssa Cruz
Electronics and code: Mario Cruz
Commissioned by: O, Miami Poetry Festival
Hosted at: Peel, banana-based soft serve in Miami Shores and the Design District

The Code

The full source code is open source on GitHub: github.com/MarioCruz/OMiamiPhone