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Show HN: I built an intercom for my 6 yo to keep us connected during quarantine
- yowlingcat 6y agoVery wholesome. Makes me realize it'd be useful to make an intercom system for my home.
- leetcrew 6y agomy 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!
- germinalphrase 6y agoI 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.
- reaperducer 6y agoMakes 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.
- tshaddox 6y ago> I'm not sure why they went out of fashion. Good question. Maybe smaller families and fewer multi-family/multi-generation households?
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI 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.
- KMnO4 6y agoEcho 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.
- andrewzah 6y agoI 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.
- ballenf 6y agoI 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 6y agoI 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.
- sokoloff 6y agoWe 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 6y agoI'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 6y ago> 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 6y agoI 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.
- drivers99 6y agoIf you have multiple Echo devices you can do “alexa announce _____”
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoThe Apple Watch has a walkie talkie mode which works for person to person communication.
- ronyeh 6y agoWonderful project. Thanks for the write up! I like that you were able to assemble it together.
- daylankifky 6y agoyeah, 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.
- iamflimflam1 6y agoNice, 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.
- hathawsh 6y agoYou might want to start here: https://github.com/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/tree/master/src/modules/echo-cancel 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.
- iamflimflam1 6y agoI'll take a look - really useful - thanks!
- mrlinx 6y agodo you think it has enough computer power to handle the audio signal?
- iamflimflam1 6y agoDefinitely! It's a dual core 240MHz processor. I've been running a bunch of tensorflow code on it for wake word detection.
- truetaurus 6y agoI built a web based intercom to stay connected with my parents: https://pagernation.com/ https://pagernation.com/ :)
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- simbas 6y agothis is great
- truetaurus 6y agoThanks! Still very beta though
- ignoramous 6y agoWhere were you when this discussion was happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526242 :) Thanks for building this! (edit: You're a Liverpool fan? I take back what I said... :)
- truetaurus 6y agoDamn 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!
- mxuribe 6y agoThis 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 6y agoWhat 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 6y agoBack 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.
- anamexis 6y agoIn fact you had to be on a call, otherwise the dial tone would drown out your voices.
- Triv888 6y agoYou 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).
- werdnapk 6y agoI 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 6y agoI 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.
- jaywalk 6y agoWhat country was this in? I distinctly remember dialing my own number resulting in nothing but a busy signal.
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- toomuchtodo 6y agohttps://relaygo.com/families 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 6y agoWe have a free version called Squawk over at https://www.squawk.to https://www.squawk.to
- alexchamberlain 6y agoI think the stripped down hardware is quite an important part of the offering.
- lurien 6y agoThanks 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 6y agoYour 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 6y agoHey thanks! We support QI charging for our Relay+ devices (https://relaygo.com/relay-plus#pip-relay-plus https://relaygo.com/relay-plus#pip-relay-plus)
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- celsoazevedo 6y agoThe site seems to be down? Something like WP Super Cache would help a lot during traffic spikes: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
- zumachase 6y agoFor 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 https://www.squawk.to
- justin_oaks 6y agoInteresting. 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 6y agoWe 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.
- gnicholas 6y agoLooks 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?
- spicybright 6y agoI 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 6y agoThe white buttons are a play queue of the last 4 messages I sent. When a new message arrives the corresponding button blinks.
- spicybright 6y agoSuper cool. I'm a huge fan of very simple interfaces like that.
- gsmo 6y agoThe 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 6y agoIn 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 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 6y agoI'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.
- mattzito 6y agoIt 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.
- jaywalk 6y agoAs 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 6y agoHa! 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.
- gruellan 6y agoSite is down sadly
- daylankifky 6y agoI wasn't expecting so much traffic, it's up again now
- hausenfefr2 6y agoThe 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".
- tobib 6y agoSorry, this might be a dumb question but what do you mean by "oldskool" phone?
- jaywalk 6y agoPurely analog hard-wired landline.
- adolph 6y agoNo 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-annotated https://genius.com/Bill-cosby-chocolate-cake-for-breakfast-a...
- bombcar 6y agoI 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.
- mrlinx 6y agoThat'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.
- war1025 6y agoI 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.
- bloodcarter 6y agoCool! I thought you could build something even more engaging with this https://dasha.ai/en-us/developers https://dasha.ai/en-us/developers.
- neilv 6y agoAn 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. :)
- jeroenhd 6y agoInteresting 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 6y agoMy 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.
- JTbane 6y agoBack in my day, we used a string and a can.
- daylankifky 6y agoXD
- treis 6y agoThis 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.
- visviva 6y agoThis is adorable - I love the name.
- lurker2823 6y agoor you could, you know, just hug your daughter?
- Quiark 6y agoThe only reasonable explanation I can think of why this is even necessary is that the parents are divorced and he doesn't have custody of her.
- johnx123-up 6y agoProject page https://gitlab.com/daylanKifky/daddy-box-python-module https://gitlab.com/daylanKifky/daddy-box-python-module
- betwixthewires 6y agoYou guys didn't have phones?
- germanka 6y agoBack to the analog past...