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Show HN: Baby's first international landline

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Show HN: Baby's first international landline

#1

Post by nbr23 »

Hi HN,

As a weekend project, I hacked together a physical phone, a Raspberry Pi running Asterisk and Twilio, to let toddlers safely make international calls.

I’ve documented the setup in this write-up and published the code + Ansible playbooks on GitHub so others can replicate it.

I built this so kids of expats can easily stay in touch with family on other continents.

Would love feedback from anyone who’s worked on something similar or tries building this themselves!

writeup: https://wip.tf/posts/telefonefix-building-babys-first-intern... github repos: - https://github.com/nbr23/ansible-role-telefonefix - https://github.com/nbr23/allo-wed

Show HN: Baby's first international landline
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Re: Show HN: Baby's first international landline

#4

Post by hlieberman »

I really like this... except you should add a special case for 911. I strongly believe that all phones, and anything that looks like phones, should be able to dial out in an emergency.

Obviously, this can raise its own problems -- you'll have to train the kids not to randomly dial 911! -- but you never know what circumstances might exist where someone in a panic reaches for the nearest phone.

Re: Show HN: Baby's first international landline

#6

Post by mnutt »

This is a great project writeup, I did something _very_ similar for my son. (HT802, asterisk, twilio, calling relatives) With all of the NAT involved I could never get sjsip to work properly so I ended up having to use the old sip module, but looking at yours makes me want to revisit it.

Once you have asterisk set up and running, it becomes easy to also set up all sorts of other extensions like "check the weather" / "tell a joke" / "check the train statuses". I put up some code for it here: https://github.com/mnutt/rotary

Re: Show HN: Baby's first international landline

#8

Post by bignerd_95 »

Nice project! Another route you might consider is flashing a small custom firmware on the Grandstream HT80x so the logic runs directly on the ATA instead of on the Pi/Asterisk side.

I wrote a tool that can extract and repack Grandstream firmware (https://github.com/BigNerd95/Grandstream-Firmware-HT802/tree...).

For example, I made a simple ARM patch that intercepts incoming caller IDs and triggers a bash script to decide what to do, in my case it checks a spam-lookup service and returns 0 or 1 so the ATA either rings or rejects the call.

Re: Show HN: Baby's first international landline

#9

Post by superb_dev »

hlieberman wrote: post #4

I really like this... except you should add a special case for 911. I strongly believe that all phones, and anything that looks like phones, should be able to dial out in an emergency. Obviously, this can raise its own problems -- you'll have to train the kids not to randomly dial 911! -- but you never know what circumstances might exist where someone in a panic reaches for the nearest phone.

Also if you want to test dial 911 I’ve been told you can schedule a test call with you local dispatch!

I setup a phone system with Asterisk for fun a while ago and I avoided emergency calls because I didn’t know how to safely test it

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