Show HN: Baby's First International Landline

Summary

Téléfonefix is a kid-friendly telephone system allowing kids to safely call relatives, locally and abroad. Listen to this post: Your browser does not support the audio element. Téléfonefix is a kid-friendly telephone system allowing kids to safely call relatives, locally and abroad. The main features I sought when building téléfonefix were: Do not expose the user to a screen (no apps or fancy phones). Use a physical phone. Perform calls locally and internationally. Permit/decline calls based on a ruleset. Specifically: only permit calls to be made to an adult-controlled set of numbers. timezones and “awake/asleep” schedules, to avoid calling Europe at their 1am prevent inbound calls entirely. As user-friendly as possible. A corded phone: any phone with an RJ11 connector will work. A rotary dial phone would add cool factor for kids old enough to dial them. I used this “Telephone for Seniors” . The pictured speed dial numbers are perfect for very young kids to choose who they want to call. An analog telephone adapter: I use the Grandstrean HT801 . It is well-documented and reliable. A Raspberry Pi (or any compute really) to run the software PBX asterisk on. For this setup, I used a Pi 4 B. It embeds WiFi and an ethernet port making it easy to connect both to your network and directly wire the HT801 to the Pi. A twilio account with a number purchased (~ $1.15/month). Architecture Hardware setup Phone to HT801 We simply plug an RJ11 cable in between the Phone and the HT801. HT801 to Raspberry Pi I opted to connect these two directly with an RJ45 as we will see below. Phone On the phone itself, to make updating phone numbers easier, I assigned each of the 9 speed dial picture buttons with a number from 100 to 107 and assigned 200 to the last one (which I keep for debugging). Those extensions will be translated later on to actual numbers by a small golang program I built for the occasion, allo-wed . Twilio setup First, you will need to create an Elastic SIP Trunk in twili...