[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built an intercom for my 6 yo to keep us ...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I built an intercom for my 6 yo to keep us connected
during quarantine
Author : daylankifky
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-01-07 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chordata.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (chordata.cc)
| treis wrote:
| This is a feature that is missing from Google Home. You can
| broadcast (with varying degrees of success) to other Google
| Homes, but nothing like an intercom. Seems nuts to me that with
| all their engineers they haven't implemented such a simple but
| powerful feature.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://relaygo.com/families is a great solution if you don't
| want to home brew it and don't mind a monthly fee for the cell
| service.
|
| No affiliation, just a customer/user.
| zumachase wrote:
| We have a free version called Squawk over at
| https://www.squawk.to
| lurien wrote:
| Thanks for the shoutout! Product Manager at Relay here. We also
| have an API if you want to build your own solution with it.
| relaypro.com/api & api-docs.relaypro.com
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Your api is awesome btw. If QI charging support isn't on the
| roadmap for the hardware, any chance it could get in your
| backlog? :)
| lurien wrote:
| Hey thanks! We support QI charging for our Relay+ devices
| (https://relaygo.com/relay-plus#pip-relay-plus)
| [deleted]
| hausenfefr2 wrote:
| The page isn't loading.
|
| EVERY TIME somebody attempts this yet again; 2 oldskool phones
| and a 9v battery! thats it, thats the whole thing!
|
| So I never even saw the page this post is about, but somehow I
| can just feel that it somehow involves an overkill of brand-new
| digital electronics.
|
| Like; is there a raspberryPI involved? cause I bet theres a
| RaspberryPI involved.
|
| 2 oldskool phones and 1 9v battery. AKA "telecom".
| adolph wrote:
| No no no, needs more IOT Blockchain for virtual telepresence AI
| with chatbots that recognize family roles:
|
| Kid: Can I have chocolate chocolate cake for breakfast?
|
| Chatbot: ..."So I give the child a glass of grapefruit juice
| and chocolate cake --- nutrition. Eggs, milk, and wheat in the
| chocolate cake"
|
| https://genius.com/Bill-cosby-chocolate-cake-for-breakfast-a...
| mrlinx wrote:
| That's a nasty comment, it might work for you, but its not for
| everyone.
|
| I for one, have created one using Mumble on raspberry, and
| works even better that OP's solution. I have it running on my
| computer, and I can mute/unmute with a mouse click. Works for
| me.
| tobib wrote:
| Sorry, this might be a dumb question but what do you mean by
| "oldskool" phone?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Purely analog hard-wired landline.
| bombcar wrote:
| I have an intercom setup built out of old Cisco 7975 phones and
| a Wazo installation (a wrapper around Asterix basically) - it
| works decently well and the phones are durable. PoE switches
| (also super cheap on eBay) give me that early 2000s ease of
| setup.
| truetaurus wrote:
| I built a web based intercom to stay connected with my parents:
| https://pagernation.com/
|
| :)
| ignoramous wrote:
| Where were you when this discussion was happening:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526242 :)
|
| Thanks for building this! (edit: You're a Liverpool fan? I take
| back what I said... :)
| truetaurus wrote:
| Damn it! This is what happens when you take a proper vacation
| :D :/ Oh well!
|
| Yes I am! But we are struggling right now so feel pity for
| me!
| [deleted]
| simbas wrote:
| this is great
| truetaurus wrote:
| Thanks! Still very beta though
| mxuribe wrote:
| This is great! And you just gave me an idea to try and
| implement/code up a more basic version into a matrix room.
| Basically, record a voice message and drop it into a person's
| matrix room. (I've been on matrix since the beginning, but am
| moving my family over to matrix now fully as our family comms
| platform.) Thanks, and kudos on this!
| truetaurus wrote:
| What is matrix? This was my first try at web audio, so ya its
| good fun to try! If you need anything let me know!
| colanderman wrote:
| Back in the days of landlines, all corded phones in a house
| effectively acted as an intercom system. Two or more users could
| pick up handsets, and their voices would be broadcast to one
| another.
|
| This worked even while on a call. If you had siblings (or
| snooping parents), you learned to be alert for the click sound
| during a call which indicated that someone else had picked up a
| handset and was now eavesdropping.
| abraae wrote:
| When I was a kid, a single phone line was shared between 3 or
| so homes. If you picked up the phone and heard the neighbors
| talking, you said sorry and hung up and waited for a while
| before trying again.
|
| When the phone rang, the ring was morse code for the letter
| matching the intended home. Our number was 4045D, so our ring
| was long, short, short.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| It's amazing to think that even switchboard operators were a
| thing long into the 1980s.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| There wasn't an operator, though. It's a "party line". The
| same wire pair is connected to multiple subscribers. My
| grandmother had one of these in the early 80s.
| alexpotato wrote:
| My dad grew up with "party lines", as they were called back
| then, with over 10 lines.
|
| The number of rings determined who the call was for and
| anyone (even in different houses on the same line) could pick
| up and listen in or talk on the line.
| jjcon wrote:
| I don't know why exactly but I genuinely love this image -
| thank you for sharing. It makes me nostalgic for a time I
| never even experienced
| mattbk1 wrote:
| We used to do this by calling the house number, hanging up, and
| picking up both ends on the ring.
| brutuscat wrote:
| How old are we all now that we talk about this as if it where
| ancient stuff? I remember my grandfather tell me about how they
| used to gather around the radio to listen to the radio shows
| (or whatever these were called...). Incredible how something
| like a land line phone is now a thing of the past (not so
| distant!). In Argentina it was not until the lates nineties
| that most people have access to a phone at home. Now everyone
| has a mobile phone. The power of technology evolving at
| exponential rate I guess!
| colanderman wrote:
| I'm only 35, but even when I was young (90s) the rotary
| phones we had were considered dated technology. (Pushbutton
| phones were more typical; cordless phones were the new
| thing.) Northeast US.
|
| My mother still uses those rotary phones, BTW. Somehow the
| telco in her area still supports click-dialing. Incoming
| calls are great, every damn phone in the house rings
| simultaneously; sounds like a fire alarm.
| vmception wrote:
| I was thinking that too, but at the same time I'm glad those
| days are over. I don't miss that at all.
|
| I was thrilled that my ISP/Cable company didn't try to sell
| me their "TV and Phone" bundle because they understood the
| absurdity or could tell by my voice and interests that I
| wouldn't be interested or the target audience.
| darkwater wrote:
| > In Argentina it was not until the lates nineties that most
| people have access to a phone at home. Now everyone has a
| mobile phone. The power of technology evolving at exponential
| rate I guess!
|
| And there are places elsewhere in the world (for example,
| some African countries) that skipped completely landlines
| because mobile phones require much less pervasive
| infrastructure to work properly.
| thatsamonad wrote:
| I used my very first paycheck from my very first job as a teen
| to get my own phone line set up in my room. Mostly so I could
| use the internet (dial-up at the time) without tying up the
| phone line, but also so I could avoid my siblings snooping on
| my calls.
|
| It also worked out because my parents could just call me when
| it was time for dinner.
| beamatronic wrote:
| That must have been a big paycheck!
| oliwarner wrote:
| Mid 90s you'd only pay $15 a month for basic service in
| some places. Probably less for second lines.
|
| ISPs were spottier. I knew some people with T1s paid for
| with weekend jobs, but some could barely scrape 56k costs.
| beamatronic wrote:
| Where I lived, the minimum wage was about three bucks.
| emidln wrote:
| Getting connected the first time is cheap. It's the bill
| that comes for the second month for all those minutes that
| gets you!
| anamexis wrote:
| In fact you had to be on a call, otherwise the dial tone would
| drown out your voices.
| Triv888 wrote:
| You could dial just 1 digit and the dial tone would stop. You
| could tap the off switch to do pulse dialing too (a bit like
| morse code).
| Animats wrote:
| You can still do that on hard-wired AT&T land lines. The
| hardware at the CO end supports it, and it's still enabled.
| colanderman wrote:
| Yep, I forgot this step.
| werdnapk wrote:
| I forget the exact details, but as a kid, I'd tap the
| switch and hang up the phone I think and then that would
| cause the phone to ring in the house so that you could
| "call" somebody.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I remember you could dial your own number, and it would
| call you back with a recording.
|
| I also remember dialing a three digit number (maybe 118),
| and an automated voice would reply with the number you
| are calling from.
| buckminster wrote:
| In the UK bitd (~1980) the test number was 174. It just
| rang you back when you hung up. There was no message. The
| exchanges weren't that sophisticated.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| I've also (a decade ago) called my own number (a cell
| line) and it gave me my voice mail as if I had just
| "speed dialed" "1"
| jaywalk wrote:
| What country was this in? I distinctly remember dialing
| my own number resulting in nothing but a busy signal.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I had a friend who had an intercom system in their home -- they
| were not uncommon in suburban, mid-Century modern homes in the
| day.
|
| Unlike using multiple telephones, the recipient did not have to
| be on the line -- you could broadcast "Dinner's ready!".
|
| I think I need an intercom as my teen daughters spend all their
| time up in their rooms....
| asciimov wrote:
| My Kindergarten class in the late 80's had a phone system
| between play areas for the kids to use. The system was built
| using some old phones and lantern batteries for power. As a
| small child it was really neat to pick up the phone and talk to
| someone on the other side of the classroom.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Wow, that's so cool!
| pradn wrote:
| I recall trying to build a can-and-string phone. There's
| something magical about remote communication, especially if
| it's completely analog - just the power of your voice.
| Macha wrote:
| This ended before landlines did - When I was growing up it was
| common that you only had one phone line connected (or only one
| period). Multiple handsets were handled by a base station which
| used some form of wireless transmission. If the handset hadn't
| been used to pick up a call, it wouldn't play back the signal
| (I'm sure given the time period, it was still being broadcast,
| and unsecured, but it was still a bit more involved to listen
| in than just picking up the other handset).
| colanderman wrote:
| That's what I meant by "corded phones". You are of course
| correct this would not work with a single set of cordless
| phones.
|
| You are right, cordless phones definitely broadcast with no
| encryption of any sort. There was a recent HN thread about
| how radio receivers were banned from receiving the band these
| phones used because of this.
| hnarn wrote:
| While this _could_ be the case, it was not _always_ the case
| for landlines.
| visviva wrote:
| This is adorable - I love the name.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Very wholesome. Makes me realize it'd be useful to make an
| intercom system for my home.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I would almost prefer to make my walls selectively "invisible"
| to sound. It would require the ability to quiet/mute as
| desired, but it could also be nice to just talk toward to my
| kid's room, my wife's office, etc. and be heard.
| drivers99 wrote:
| If you have multiple Echo devices you can do "alexa announce
| _____"
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| The Apple Watch has a walkie talkie mode which works for person
| to person communication.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Makes me realize it 'd be useful to make an intercom system
| for my home._
|
| Whole-home intercom systems were fairly common through the
| 1970's. I'm not sure why they went out of fashion.
|
| If you're not a tinkerer, and you're in the Apple ecosystem,
| you can get a HomePod Mini and it will do the coordination so
| that all of your iOS devices can become one big intercom
| system, even if you're not at home. Kinda like Nextel used to
| do.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Echo devices work for this as well, and can be accessed via
| any other Echo or through the Alexa app.
|
| Presumably much cheaper than HomePod Mini too; I've seen the
| Echo Flex for as low as $10.
| ballenf wrote:
| I had them in several houses over the years and don't think
| it was superseding technology that was the problem.
|
| Intercoms were:
|
| - kind of ugly and bulky
|
| - fixed in place - you needed to walk over to the panel and
| push a button to use; but now you're already by the door
| (where the panels were installed) and can probably just yell
| faster/easier
|
| - the person you're reaching might have volume turned down,
| so you resort to yelling anyway
|
| - you might be on the phone or taking a nap and would have to
| turn down to volume to avoid interruption
|
| - poor speaker/sound quality, so horrible for music playback
|
| - poor build quality and buttons/dials would regularly fail
| after 5 years or faster if used
|
| - finicky to setup with tons of manual tweaking required to
| get volume levels where desired
|
| - expensive to repair & proprietary
|
| - expensive to install
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I had completely forgotten that we actually had one back when
| I was living with my parents, because the cordless phones we
| had allowed you to call out and take calls, but also call any
| other cordless phone attached to the same base station.
|
| We didn't think much of it at first, but it was actually
| super useful because going upstairs was relatively
| inconvenient and shouting didn't work if we were wearing
| headphones.
|
| Today I guess we would just whatsapp each other.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I think the answer is simply mobile phones obviated those
| sorts of intercom systems. Either I can yell to the person,
| or I can just call/facetime them.
|
| However Apple recently introduced an Intercom / Announcement
| system to their homepods, so we'll try that at some point. I
| feel like it won't be more than a novelty unless someone
| knows that I'm in e.g. the garage.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > I'm not sure why they went out of fashion.
|
| Good question. Maybe smaller families and fewer multi-
| family/multi-generation households?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I lived in a ~3k sq ft 5 bedroom 2 story house with a total
| of 6 to 7 inter generational family members for a few years
| and it had an intercom in all the rooms. It was cool when
| we moved in, but after a few days no one ever used it.
|
| Yelling was easier than going all the way to the intercom
| button, but even then it's not often that you need to
| communicate with everyone that would justify installing an
| intercom system.
| sokoloff wrote:
| We have a 1980s style intercom that a prior owner installed.
| It's an eyesore and not even that functional. I also installed
| whole-house audio in 2009.
|
| Both have been entirely superseded by a bunch of Amazon
| Echo/related devices, which work quite well for that purpose
| and background music (some rooms I was able to interface with
| the whole house audio, but overall I wish I had that money and
| time back).
|
| As we do painting around the house, I remove the intercom
| panels and patch over the plaster.
| deftnerd wrote:
| I've long desired the functionality that the Echo & Echo Show
| provide when it comes to audio playback and intercom/video
| chat functionality. Unfortunately, I'm too suspicious of
| Amazon (and Google, for that matter) using me and my data for
| their own purposes. I hope to find an off-the-shelf solution
| some day.
| war1025 wrote:
| > Unfortunately, I'm too suspicious of Amazon (and Google,
| for that matter)
|
| For Christmas, my mom decided to get us both a Google Home
| and a Facebook Portal (with Alexa built in).
|
| We already have an Echo Dot that lives on our fridge that
| my wife's parents gave us.
|
| Anyway, I thought it was a bit interesting that out of the
| "big three" evil data stealing tech monopolies, the Google
| Home was the only one that made me uneasy. I suppose it's a
| carry over from the whole Firefox / Chrome rivalry.
|
| I don't really care for the Echo Dot we already have, but
| it is admittedly quite useful for "Hey Alexa, play
| Christmas music" or "Hey Alexa, set a timer for 10
| minutes."
|
| Also I have been legitimately impressed by the video
| quality and performance of the Facebook Portal because any
| time I've tried to use their video chat from my computer
| it's had roughly a 30 second lag and been completely
| unusable. The Portal is both a crisp picture and no
| noticeable lag.
|
| I guess the thing I should wonder most about that is why
| video chat from a traditional computer is so terrible. The
| only thing I've ever had work decently for video chat with
| family has been Skype.
| dionidium wrote:
| I bought a home last year. It had been pretty well
| maintained, but even so it had layers of forgotten technology
| I had to remove. Doorbell chimes that no longer worked. The
| panel to a long-disconnected alarm system. Phone jacks that
| hadn't been used in a decade, at least. Layers of unrelated
| coax runs from various satellite and cable companies.
|
| It's remarkable how much of a difference you can make just by
| skimming off the layers of antiquated crud in a room.
|
| It's kind of wild to me how often these things are left in
| place even as they're retired.
| war1025 wrote:
| I wish it was more common to have conduit runs for cables
| rather than just having them strung randomly through walls
| and crawl spaces. That would make upgrading from one
| technology to the next much easier.
| sokoloff wrote:
| We wired my parent's place during construction in 1999. A
| mix of mostly plastic conduit with wires fished inside
| and a couple of runs that were not in conduit.
|
| Out of 56 total drop locations (many with multiple
| cables), we've seen the need to fish new wires down the
| conduits exactly 0 times in 21 years. That makes for a
| tough RoI calculation, especially if we'd been paying for
| all the labor to do the conduit installs.
| leetcrew wrote:
| my parents had an intercom system in the house when I was a
| kid. they regretted it as soon as my siblings and I figured out
| how to operate the phones!
| [deleted]
| gsmo wrote:
| The website appears to be down. Having said that...
|
| I may not be remembering this correctly, but didn't most mobile
| phones also have a walkie-talkie feature built-in in the 90's ? I
| don't think any have that now.
| teachrdan wrote:
| In the US it was mostly Nextel phones that had the push-to-talk
| feature, which allowed walkie talkie-like communication. (one
| to many, no cost, etc.)
|
| from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextel_Communications
|
| "Nextel's iDEN network offered a then unique push-to-talk
| "walkie-talkie" feature in addition to direct-dialed voice
| calls."
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'd feel the same today, but back in the
| early 2000s, that was such a great feature. I was pretty sad
| when our company decided to move from Nextel over to a
| traditional carrier without push-to-talk.
| jaywalk wrote:
| As a high schooler who only had Nextel phones for the cool
| factor, I will never forget the constant anxiety in the
| back of my mind that I'd have the phone off mute and one of
| my friends would chirp me when I'm around my parents with
| something I'd rather they not hear.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ha! I can imagine that. We occasionally had that issue,
| but mostly my group of friends and coworkers shared some
| basic rules for using the push-to-talk. E.g. no pushing
| the button and then just saying something, unless you
| were already talking back and forth; the first chirp was
| always an empty chirp. If the other party was available,
| then they could respond. Stuff like that. I can see that
| with some raunchy high school friends it could get pretty
| awkward.
| mattzito wrote:
| It was super useful to track people down when you were
| trying to coordinate. I remember on 9/11 in NYC, my nextel
| phone was the only one that was working in washington
| square park. I had a line of people waiting to use it to
| call loved ones to let them know they were okay.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I remember Nextel phones having that cool feature (and a
| distinctive chirp sound)...but don't recall other phones having
| that...THen again, i always did have cheapy phones back in the
| day. It is surprising why walkie-talkie-like features aren't
| more popular nowadays...Then again, maybe messaging apps might
| fit enough of the original need.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| The site seems to be down?
|
| Something like WP Super Cache would help a lot during traffic
| spikes: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
| war1025 wrote:
| I haven't looked into this article, but over Christmas we went to
| visit my Grandma at her nursing home, which meant we were
| separated by a window and had to talk over the phone.
|
| The latency (which I never really notice when I'm not also
| looking at the person talking) made it significantly harder to
| have a fluid conversation than it should have been.
|
| Made me wonder if something more old fashioned like a walkie-
| talkie might have been better.
| zumachase wrote:
| For anyone interested in push-to-talk/intercoms we built a free
| tool at the beginning of quarantine last year called Squawk -
| https://www.squawk.to
| gnicholas wrote:
| Looks intriguing, but from the website I can't really tell what
| it does/doesn't do. Maybe a quick youtube video would help make
| this concrete? For me, the question is: if I put this on an old
| smartphone and put it in my kid's room, can I/she use Siri to
| send each other message? Or do we have to separately open the
| app, wait for it to load, and then say the message?
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Interesting. How do you make money on it?
|
| When something is free it usually is paid for by selling my
| data, as the free-tier of a paid product, or the owners haven't
| figured out how to make money on it and are hoping to figure
| that out later.
| zumachase wrote:
| We don't but it helps with marketing and has synergies with
| other paid products
|
| Most of the traffic is P2P. We operate a couple of geo
| distributed relays for NAT'd traffic. But everything is 100%
| e2e encrypted thanks to webrtc.
|
| It's mostly a tool for us and something that helps sell our
| other products, but we decided to split it out as a separate
| app so that it could be used independently. All we collect is
| a name and email, and even those can be pseudonymous.
| ronyeh wrote:
| Wonderful project. Thanks for the write up!
|
| I like that you were able to assemble it together.
| daylankifky wrote:
| yeah, that was the best part. The gift also came with her own
| first set of (non toy) screwdrivers so she was pretty excited
| about building it.
| neilv wrote:
| An intercom/telepresence for kid is a nice idea, and sounds fun
| to build.
|
| Especially when building things with impressionable kids, I'd
| like to encourage people to try to figure out how to build things
| while minimizing unnecessary third-party dependencies, and
| secondarily by judicious selection of complexity.
|
| For example, maybe using WiFi and a SoC board with stripped-down
| Linux, and software to make them talk to each other over the LAN.
| Or maybe a microcontroller board with a WiFi module in ad-hoc
| mode. Maybe coded in one of the education-oriented programming
| tools that the kid will be able to start using soon. Or maybe
| old-school analog circuits over a pair of copper.
|
| (Or, if you want the kid employable this year, maybe that means
| gluing together 10 different SaaSes that snoop on your traffic,
| building a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud for um reasons, using
| 3 Web frameworks, pulling in 1,000 NPM dependencies, and throwing
| in half a dozen third-party trackers. :)
| gruellan wrote:
| Site is down sadly
| daylankifky wrote:
| I wasn't expecting so much traffic, it's up again now
| JTbane wrote:
| Back in my day, we used a string and a can.
| daylankifky wrote:
| XD
| spicybright wrote:
| I love this. I'm curious what the buttons do though. What's the
| purpose of the play queue? Are you able to see when a new message
| comes in?
| daylankifky wrote:
| The white buttons are a play queue of the last 4 messages I
| sent. When a new message arrives the corresponding button
| blinks.
| spicybright wrote:
| Super cool. I'm a huge fan of very simple interfaces like
| that.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Nice, I've been looking to build something based around some
| ESP32 boards. But I can't seem to find a good echo cancellation
| algorithm. I guess the simple solution is to have a push to talk
| button on each end, but it would be nice to be able to do full
| duplex.
| mrlinx wrote:
| do you think it has enough computer power to handle the audio
| signal?
| hathawsh wrote:
| You might want to start here:
| https://github.com/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/tree/master/src/mod...
|
| It would be very interesting to port that code. Another option,
| obviously, is to use a Raspberry Pi instead with pulseaudio and
| module-echo-cancel enabled.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Interesting choice to use Telegram voice messages for the
| intercom. I don't think I would've personally trusted Telegram's
| unencrypted, third-party system to store messages intended for
| children, though.
|
| I've theorised about such a system myself, though I'd go with
| live voice-chat through something like a private SIP server (with
| multiple channels and/or a broadcast mode). With a bit of setup,
| you could probably integrate Android's native SIP dialer and the
| various other desktop SIP tools into the system and connect to a
| channel remotely.
| ev1 wrote:
| My underengineering method would be to just run a Mumble server
| on the LAN and join everything to it.
|
| This also means you can do things like turn certain intercoms
| one-way, or certain ones into priority speaker broadcast mode
| in software client remotely.
| bloodcarter wrote:
| Cool! I thought you could build something even more engaging with
| this https://dasha.ai/en-us/developers.
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(page generated 2021-01-07 23:00 UTC)