Alternatives
Products that do what Sidebar – a private ESP32 intercom for five kids, no accounts does
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…
- 1IB
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
- 2BS
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
- 3IO
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
- 4FA
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
- 5AS
2015 · github.com
- 6IB
2021 · chordata.cc
- 7
- 8PS
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
- 9OS
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…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 10RP
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
- 11FI
This is something fun I’ve been hacking on recently: ridiculously simple group chat. Go to http://faces.io and then get your friends to do the same. That’s it! :-D Currently works best in Chrome. It’s definitely beta status at best. Audio can get weird—be ready to mute. ;-) Let me know what you think!
2014
- 12IB
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
- 13IL
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
- 14
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
23d ago · github.com
- 15IM
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
- 16TA
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…
Oct 2025 · together.lol
- 17IO
This started as a "cyberdeck" style crafts project using ESP32-S3, for some retro coding. Then I got carried away and wrote a self-hosted mini C compiler for it. Now I published the whole system that runs it. The core reusable parts are also packaged in Espressif Components Registry as "BreezyBox". So far, this platform lives up to my dreams: instant on, snappy when optimized, flexible with resource allocation. I upgraded to a bigger screeen: Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-7B, 7", 1024x600. It takes some effort to drive it with good speed on the S3, but this sort of challenge is exactly why I…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 18OF
Hi HN, I’ve been building Opencom, an open-source customer messaging platform - basically an Intercom alternative you can run yourself with minimal setup or infrastructure to manage. Repo + demo here: https://github.com/opencom-org/opencom https://opencom.dev I started working on it after years of frustration using Intercom. I love the selection of tools they offer, but not their complex and expensive pricing model or their frequent layout and UX changes. I wanted an open source alternative that was simple and cheap to run, making it accessible for projects of…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 19WL
Hi HN, I’ve been working on a Rust userspace radio stack for running WFB-style links from macOS using RTL8812AU USB adapters. Full disclosure: I'm a software engineer, but not really a hardware or embedded systems engineer, so Codex GPT 5.5 has done the lion-share of the work here along with a bit of help from Claude Opus 4.7 here and there. It's taken about 1.5 to 2 weeks to get from zero to this first release. macOS doesn't expose the monitor-mode / packet-injection path that WFB systems normally rely on. I really didn't like the idea of needing a separate linux box just to talk WFB…
May 2026 · github.com
- 20AM
TLDR: I built a "quick and dirty " private social network for my friends, posted on Reddit and HN, got some interest so now have built it properly along with my brother. site link: https://intimost.com/login/ demo creds: [email protected] Demo123! Full version: I needed a social network where I can just send updates and nothing else. So I built it, my friends liked and now I have built it "for the world". Everything is private by default. - Text-only updates - No likes. Only views to acknowledge a post - [in development] Comments are private between the poster and…
Oct 2025
- 21PU
After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
2024 · github.com
- 22IA
http://instachat.im Instachat is my side-project and is just a bit of fun: I am a .NET programmer and decided to learn SignalR so a chat program was the best way. This is version 2: v1 was done in February and I left it for a while but it was frankly awful with too much interface. I decided to strip it down to the basics and since I spend lots of time in the command line myself (I am a Windows Infrastructure consultant by day - What can I say? I like the command line!) I thought it might be cool to have a whole site like this. I kept it simple and secure: I don't store the contents…
2014
- 23
- 24CS
Today my friends and I are launching a project we've been hacking on for the past few years. It's friendly web based group chat (with apps for Mac, Windows, and iOS) that's not limited to a single business. It basically offers the power of XMPP with a simple UI. chatsimply.com Please check it out and let me know what you think!
2014
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