Alternatives
Products that do what Baby's first international landline does
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: -…
- 1BM
Hi HN! I’m proud to share that we have built a real 3rd party iMessage client for Android. We did it by reverse engineering the iMessage protocol and encryption system. It's available to download today (no waitlist): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima and there's a technical writeup here: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works. Unlike every other attempt to build an iMessage app for Android (including our first gen app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac server relay in the cloud. The app connects directly to Apple…
2023 · beeper.com
- 2BA
Hi. I heard HN likes e-paper gadgets so I wanted to share a little side project I’ve been working on with @sqfmi. We’re building Beepberry - a portable e-paper computer for hackers, designed for chatting on Beeper. My day job is running Beeper [0], but I will always have a soft spot for building hardware. I wanted to create a ‘weekend’ device that would let me stay in touch with friends and family, without the distractions of a full smartphone. I imagined a tiny, hackable e-paper screen with a physical keyboard, powered by a Raspberry Pi, that I could use to chat around my home…and pretty…
2023 · beepberry.sqfmi.com
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- 4AT
Alt link: https://mrchristmas.com/products/santas-magical-telephone Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z7QJxZWFQg The first time I talked with AI santa and it responded with a joke I was HOOKED. The fun/nonsense doesn't click until you try it yourself. What's even more exciting is you can build it yourself: libpeer: https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer pion: https://github.com/pion/webrtc Then go do all your fun logic in your Pion server. Connect to any Voice AI provider, or roll your own via Open Source.…
Oct 2025 · walmart.com
- 5OC
Hello HN community, This is bootstrapped/indie hacker-ish. Would appreciate feedback. What it is: You create a link (e.g. onair/yourname), and anyone can call you from it. Caller uses a web browser to make the call (not dedicated app). You can create as many links as you want, and can direct calls to colleagues in a round-robin or escalation manner. In a way, it's like the "opposite of Calendly"; whereas Calendly is about meetings in the future, OnAir is about immediate meetings. Motivation behind it: One of our SaaS products was struggling to grow. We believed that if we provide…
2024 · onair.io
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- 7IB
Jan 2026 · voklit.com
- 8UP
Scan QR → web terminal → vibe coding in bed. Mobile-first terminal via Cloudflare Quick Tunnel. No port forwarding. Feedback welcome.
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 9IB
I didn’t have a doorbell before (multiple reasons) and my house feels unwelcoming without one. So I built a doorbell app that uses a QR code - visitors scan the QR code to ring the doorbell and I get notified on my phone. Here is an example of the QR code I have on my door. You can scan it and say hello: https://www.thebacklog.net/img/2024/10/show-hn.png This was also a great excuse to build my first app for Android and iPhone. I’d love to get some feedback before I spend more time polishing the app. Please try it out and feel free to ask me any questions! No…
2024 · dingdongdoorbell.com
- 10WL
Hey all, Just wanted to show off this app I built, its a LAN based WebRTC baby monitor that connects any apple devices together over WIFI so you can turn an old iPad or iPhone into a baby monitor! I got a bit sick of all the sketchy products that require you to buy another device and may or may not connect to Chinese servers and store all your information somewhere. So I figured what if there were no servers and we could just use our existing devices! I would love any feedback! You will need two apple devices to test it, but simulators do work.
Sep 2025 · apps.apple.com
- 11
Hello all - Inspired by many who build/assemble for their daughters/sons, I took cue and assembled a two-way communication between my son and his friends. Nothing spectacular. Just basic stuff to talk. He is eleven and doesn't have a phone. I wanted him to talk to his friends without an account, a feed, or an algorithm in between, so I built five ESP32-S3 touchscreen units, one per kid. Tap a friend's name, their unit rings. Tap Everyone, they all ring. Each unit dials outbound to a relay I run, so no house opens a port. Audio is uncompressed 16 kHz PCM in 20 ms frames, AES-256-GCM…
Aug 2026 · sundaradnus.ca
- 12APA pager▲104
Hello HN, I basically don't use notifications for anything. The noise is too much. Slack is too loud. Email is too slow. But sometimes you do need a note in your face. I found myself missing 1990s pagers. I wanted a digital equivalent - something that does one thing: beep until I ack it. So I built UDP-7777. Concept: - 0% Cloud: It listens on UDP Port 7777. No accounts, no central servers. You don't need Tailscale/ZeroTier/WG/etc, it's just easy for device sets. - CAPCODES: It maps your IP address (LAN or Tailscale) to a retro 10-digit "CAPCODE" that looks like a phone number…
Dec 2025 · udp7777.com
- 13IM
I built CallSky as a simple alternative for international calling after Microsoft shut down Skype earlier this month. The app lets you make calls to landlines and cell phones worldwide starting at $0.01/minute with a pay-as-you-go model. I noticed that while Teams replaced Skype's video/chat conferencing, it doesn't offer the same affordable PSTN calling that many people relied on. WhatsApp and other messaging apps don't solve this - whether you're an expat calling the IRS for taxes, reaching elderly family members who don't use smartphones, or contacting people in areas with…
2025 · callsky.io
- 14WB
http://picirus.com For Startup Weekend Tulsa, we created a small low-power appliance (built on Raspberry Pi) that you connect to your different cloud accounts -- Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, etc. -- and it downloads a copy of all your stuff every night. I was thinking about all the people I love who share directly to the cloud, without a lot of planning for the case where their Facebook account gets hacked, their Dropbox account has a glitch, or one of these services they love goes out of business suddenly some day. We had a ton of fun building Picirus during Startup Weekend. I highly…
2012
- 15IM
I built a little script that gives me a fake phone call to escape boring and awkward situations. I bought a virtual number from twilio and saved it as one of my relatives. Whenever I feel stuck, I just tap a button called “ESCAPE” on my phone. It sends a request to my remote server. The server runs a small Python script which schedules an actual call. After a minute, my phone rings and plays a pre-recorded audio. I simply say “sorry, I’m getting a call” and walk away. A tiny project, but it has saved me so many times. Script -…
Sep 2025
- 16PT
I built a software-defined radio transmission platform that runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. It spawns its own WiFi hotspot and serves a web UI — connect from any device and you have a portable RF signal generator with 12 transmission modes: FM broadcasting with RDS, FT8, RTTY, FSK, POCSAG paging, Morse code, SSTV image transmission, voice cloning via live mic, spectrum painting, IQ replay, carrier wave, and frequency sweeps. Everything runs through a browser interface. Upload audio files, type messages, configure frequencies, and transmit. The Pi's GPIO pin does the actual RF generation via…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 17BA
Hello Hacker News, My co-founder and I have spent the better part of years developing a completely hackable Home Automation toolset that runs on a Raspberry Pi, or any machine running Linux. With just a Raspberry Pi and a $45 Z-Wave dongle (https://www.amazon.com/Aeotec-Z-Stick-Z-Wave-create-gateway/...), you can run a complete home automation system! Our hub will support any Z-Wave or Z-Wave plus device. We are cloud hosted service that doesn't require you to purchase any proprietary hardware. Our hub software runs on NodeJS and is completely open source. We encourage…
2018
- 18JA
I have two instances that I'd love to see HN hug to death at https://jonline.io (to which I manually deploy) and https://getj.online (which is deployed to for any commit to main on GitHub). They're both running (side by side, in their own namespaces) on a bare minimum 2GB/50GB DigitalOcean droplet using DOKS (DigitalOcean Kubernetes). The configurations are in: https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline/tree/main/deploys/k8s So far this is a solo endeavor, but with my recent CI integrations and consolidations of things within the…
2023 · github.com
- 19PH
Hi, I just saw this tweet[^1] by @QuinnyPig that mentions accessing your Pi-hole while traveling thanks to TailScale and wondered how to deploy Pi-hole at the edge, instead of a home lab, for improved latency. My simple solution involves running it on Fly.io to make it easy to relocate anywhere, and embedding tailscale into the same firecracker VM (né docker container) to keep the infra dead simple and cheap. Naively deploying a publicly accessible DNS resolver is not ideal[^2] so the main constraint was to secure the VM by 1) keeping all public ports closed and 2) having Pi-hole listen only…
2022 · github.com
- 20SH
Hi HN folks ! I am the author of AVA, a self hosted AI Voice Agent that plugs into Asterisk/Freepbx so you own all the aspects of an AI Voice agent in your own infrastructure. It uses Asterisk native Audiosocket/RTP with python engine to run STT,LLM and TTS loop. The project support several full providers openai, gemini, grok, elevenlabs out of the box and also provides options to build custom pipelines by choosing different stt tts and llm. It also supports full local agent if you have a GPU with 25GB RAM which enables realtime conversation along with tool calling. I started this…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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I build a skype clone, where you can make international calls via browser. Skype was my go to app for that, but since they shut it down, decided to build my own. Its perfect for calling international customer support, or any other gov numbers. Its pay-as-you-go - so no subscription charges, very transparent pricing. You can just top up $5 and see pricing in real time during the call.
Oct 2025 · bubblyphone.com
- 23AL
Hi HN, I’m one of the maintainers of Bridge Anonymization. We built this because the existing solutions for translating sensitive user content are insufficient for many of our privacy-concious clients (Governments, Banks, Healthcare, etc.). We couldn't send PII to third-party APIs, but standard redaction destroyed the translation quality. If you scrub "John" to "[PERSON]", the translation engine loses gender context (often defaulting to masculine), which breaks grammatical agreement in languages like French or German. So we built a reversible, local-first pipeline for Node.js/Bun. Here…
Dec 2025 · medium.com
- 24WH
With internet censorship and surveillance on the rise, ie; UK Online Safety Bill (July 2025) and Australia's social media legislation (Dec 2025) introducing mandatory age verification (read: initial step on the pathway to social credit), I wanted a privacy-first solution that protects browsing history from ISPs and third-party verification services, but not one that requires you to be an Einstein to deploy. This stack turns a Raspberry Pi (or any OpenWrt-compatible device) into a network-wide VPN gateway. Key features: - Firewall kill switch: VPN down = no internet (not a software rule that…
Nov 2025 · github.com
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