Alternatives
Products that do what OpenPayphone – open-source guts for a 1996 coin payphone (Pi and SIP) does
- 1TB
2020 · mtlynch.io
- 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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- 4HHaxophone▲526
I built this during Covid. When I released it, some of the parts went out of stock or skyrocketed in price, no longer making this an economic DIY project. Now that things are getting back to almost normal, I thought I'd share it here and request feedback. This is a very niche project for people who like the same things I do: saxophones, Rust, mechanical keyboards and the Raspberry Pi.
2022 · github.com
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2013 · madebynathan.com
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2019 · github.com
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- 9WO
Hey HN! Braden here, creator of Whispering, an open-source speech-to-text app. I really like dictation. For years, I relied on transcription tools that were almost good, but they were all closed-source. Even a lot of them that claimed to be “local” or “on-device” were still black boxes that left me wondering where my audio really went. So I built Whispering. It’s open-source, local-first, and most importantly, transparent with your data. Your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to a local provider (Whisper C++, Speaches, etc.) or your chosen…
2025 · github.com
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- 14DA
2015 · github.com
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2025 · github.com
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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: -…
Oct 2025 · wip.tf
- 18HN
(TL;DR: http://i.imgur.com/LuPHqiN.png) While digging around in drawers that hadn't been touched for decades, I found a wonderful piece of history. The Palm Treo 600 [1] was the Mercedes-Benz of the cellphone 10 years ago, and I was lucky enough to rediscover one.[2] So I decided to restore it to working order, slapping in a T-Mobile SIM[3] and a fresh battery. It worked! It could browse the Internet[4], send/receive text messages[5], make phone calls...[6] The onboard browser even passed Acid1[7,8] and could do some level of JavaScript![9] Unfortunately, most websites…
2015
- 19IM
A few years ago, right after high school, I decided to try to make a simultaneous translation app for Android as a side project, it took longer than expected (about 2 years) and I had to make a lot of compromises (I had to use Google's API and therefore make users use a developer key because at the time there were no free solutions for speech recognition and translation that had good quality). At the end of university, I decided to pick it up again and finally, using OpenAi's Whisper for speech recognition and Meta's NLLB for translation (with both running locally on the phone), I managed to…
2024 · github.com
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Pi-card is an AI powered voice assistant running locally on a Raspberry Pi. It is capable of doing anything a standard LLM (like ChatGPT) can do in a conversational setting. In addition, if there is a camera equipped, you can also ask Pi-card to take a photo, describe what it sees, and then ask questions about that. It uses distributed models so latency is something I'm working on, but I am curious on where this could go, if anywhere. Very much a WIP. Feedback welcome :-)
2024 · github.com
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2024 · github.com
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2024 · github.com
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TerminalPhone is a single, self-contained Bash script that provides anonymous, end-to-end encrypted voice and text communication between two parties over the Tor network. It operates as a walkie-talkie: you record a voice message, and it is compressed, encrypted, and transmitted to the remote party as a single unit. You can also send encrypted text messages during a call. No server infrastructure, no accounts, no phone numbers. Your Tor hidden service .onion address is your identity.
Feb 2026 · gitlab.com
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