Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Sidebar – a private ESP32 intercom for five kids, no accounts
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…
Sidebar is a private intercom system built on ESP32-S3 touchscreen devices that allows a small group of children to communicate without phones, accounts, or algorithms. Each unit connects through a central relay… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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I spent the last few days building out a nicer ChatGPT-like interface to use Mistral 7B and Llama 3 fully within a browser (no deps and installs). I’ve used the WebLLM project by MLC AI for a while to interact with LLMs in the browser when handling sensitive data but I found their UI quite lacking for serious use so I built a much better interface around WebLLM. I’ve been using it as a therapist and coach. And it’s wonderful knowing that my personal information never leaves my local computer. Should work on Desktop with Chrome or Edge. Other browsers are adding WebGPU support as well - see…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Client library for Minimal Chat. Contribute to minimalchat/client development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
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: -…
2025 · wip.tf · its alternatives →
- 4
Open-source live-chat, email support, omni-channel desk. An alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc. 🔥💬 - chatwoot/chatwoot
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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As part of a little research and also some fun I decided to try my hand at seeing how small of an ESP32 board I can make with functioning WiFi.
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Welcome to Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. This is a project that allows anyone to easily build their own self-hosted J.A.R.V.I.S-like voice assistant. In my mind vocal computing is the future of human-computer interaction and by open sourcing this code I hope to expedite us on that path. I have had a blast working on this so far and I'm excited to continue to build with it. It uses whisper.cpp [1], Coqui TTS [2] and OpenAI [3] to do speech-to-text, text-to-text and text-to-speech inference all 100% locally (except for text-to-text). In the future I plan to swap out OpenAI for llama.cpp [4]. It is…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Open-source live-chat, email support, omni-channel desk. An alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc. 🔥💬 - chatwoot/chatwoot
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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2021 · youtube.com · its alternatives →
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hi! video[0] The idea is you could carry around this hardware and ask it any questions about the conference. Who is speaking, what are they speaking about etc... it connects via WebRTC to a LLM and you get a bunch of info. This is a workshop/demo project I did for a conference. When I was talking to the organizers I mentioned that I enjoy doing hardware + WebRTC projects. They thought that was cool and so we ran with it. I have been doing these ESP32 + voice ai projects for a bit now. Started with an embedded sdk for livekit[1] that jul 2024 and been noodling with it since then. This…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey hacker news, We’re the cofounders at Psychic.dev (http://psychic.dev) where we help companies connect LLMs to private data. With the launch of Llama 2, we think it’s finally viable to self-host an internal application that’s on-par with ChatGPT, so we did exactly that and made it an open source project. We also included a vector DB and API server so you can upload files and connect Llama 2 to your own data. The RAG in RAGstack stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation, a technique where the capabilities of a large language model (LLM) are augmented by retrieving information…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Watch strangers talk on Omegle (man in the middle attack explained for kids) - bermanto/mitm-omegle
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I've never posted on ShowHN before, but I wanted to share my Xmas 2025 project; to try a new approach to controlling our kids screen time. This also involved massively over-engineering a solution in order to play with a shiny new gadget (and avoid the in laws at Christmas, obviously) I've shared some learnings on AI coding with embedded devices, and how I approached the product design/hardware selection side of things. The Web App is at https://screenie.org - and I'm Open Sourcing the device and web app code later today (links to follow on that site)
Jan 2026 · partridge.works · its alternatives →
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Open-source live-chat, email support, omni-channel desk. An alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc. 🔥💬 - chatwoot/chatwoot
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I built a retro-style beeper (pager) for Sentry
2025 · techsquidtv.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hello Hacker News! I've spent the last 6 months or so designing and building this, The Attention Button. It's an IoT desk toy that lets you send a quick nudge to whoever you hold dear, letting them know you're thinking of them. Like a direct line to their attention. It is my first major electronics project and I have learnt so much making it. I'd love to hear what you guys think!
2025 · theattentionbutton.in · its alternatives →
- 19
Optimized ESP32-S3/P4 fully offline speech to text and text to speech system for Micropython and AtomVM, featuring a finetuned STT model for noisy environments, plus a data generation/field capture/model finetuning framework. Includes high performance 4/8bit int kernels for Xtensa/RiscV PIE vector u
15d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20IL
Hello HN, I want to share something that I worked on for quite a while as my side project - www.heahy.com an IRC like chat where you can share various media and even record yourself (using web MediaRecorder api). Here is a thread with short explanation on how it works: https://www.heahy.com/channel/homepage/thread/3900adb9e441a09abc757461 I am looking for any feedback and if you have any ideas, advice or questions I am eager to hear it here or on heahy!
2020 · its alternatives →
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A personal website served from six ESP32-S3 microcontrollers: elected load balancer, virtual-MAC failover, OTA with rollback. No cloud, no CDN, no Pi. - Novotarskyi/ivan-bohun
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22IM
orignally shared this on startup school... i thought id' share it here. i'm using a `nocode communication tool` (a web-based interface... a single browser tab!) for all of these things: 1. landing page — the landing page is the product and i wanted for folks to feel "transported" right into the app without having to walk through a shitty b2b marketing-style content. this is akin to my experience back in the `BBS` days of the mid-90's where you were immediately into the app, community, and tool. no terms of service, no privacy policy. just pure, immediate value. 2. building community — we…
2021 · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second. Why I made it - Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community. - I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the…
2025 · together.lol · its alternatives →
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A public chatting room for everyone. Contribute to liam-ilan/sendverse development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →