Looking for Suggestions for an Intercom (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by Nednarb44@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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I'm looking for a better, more private solution to an intercom I have between the house and my barn. I have Ethernet run out there, and I currently use the "drop-in" feature on some Amazon echo devices. I'm looking to get away from the Amazon devices entirely (maybe implementing the pine speaker they announced?)

I don't have a lot of requirements, though VoIP would be preferred over a radio style, since it's a metal barn and blocks a lot of signals. I'm good with some self hosted solution, and ideally there's a dedicated device, as I don't want to use my phone or computer for it all the time. I'm probably missing some obvious solution, but figured I'd try to get some ideas together.

Thoughts?

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[-] linearchaos@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

Look into asterix

https://www.voip-info.org/asterisk-paging-and-intercom/

You should be able to pick up voip phones relatively cheaply these days with all of the commercial offices going to remote.

[-] Nednarb44@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

That looks pretty good. Looks like a lot of information to parse through, reading up now, thanks!

[-] grapemix@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

But you need to know where your family/friend are. Or can the system broadcast to multiple locations?

I saw some companies develop modern walkie talkie solution without wifi nor mobile signal for emergency rescue or expedition. But they are expensive.

[-] Nednarb44@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Well in my scenario, both locations would be fixed, so I'm not really concerned about finding locations.

[-] linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah that's the problem, there are corporate options for corporate prices, but home intercoms have more or less disappeared with the advent of cell phones that everybody just has on them anyway.

I just put Amazon devices in most of the populated areas of the house and use broadcast, but honestly we rarely use them it's a lot easier just to text somebody.

One might consider getting some older phones mounting them in locations bringing power to them and running walkie talkie software.

[-] pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

expanding on this, depending on technical skill level:

i’d probably get some SBCs like raspberry pi (or cheaper; raspberry pi is probably overkill here!) to be the terminals, run asterisk and have an extension for each terminal… run a voip client that automatically picks up any call it receives, and connects to a mic & speaker, connect a button to GPIO and write a script to call a conference extension for all devices (or multiple buttons for multiple extensions to call individual locations)… i’d probably add a second button for a “call back”-like feature - a terminal broadcasts a message and there’s a button to reply only to the terminal the last call was from

this would allow you to use phones as terminals too - even receiving “calls”, although in that case the caller would have to wait for the phone user to pick up - just like a regular phone. probably more useful as a transmitter

all of these things aren’t super difficult in isolation - probably setting up asterisk is the hardest part