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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[-] 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