Hey HN! Lurker since 2020, first real post. I've been building something I think this crowd might appreciate: a phone. There is no screen. There is no Slack integration. It does not use AI. It will never do these things. It does make calls like it's 1999, though, without the modern nonsense.
I'm a veteran professional software engineer, novice hardware enthusiast. I've created a project that I've named "Digits" where I wanted to play with doing both and learning along the way. So I did what one does and gutted a common retro phone knockoff and created an entire platform to create a private, end to end encrypted, self-hostable calling platform to accurately emulate phones from the '90s.
I am not selling anything and I do not intend to (I've got a great job already). The software and hardware are licensed AGPL-3.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0. I want people to build this and share it; self hosting is native, though I happily serve this for free from my homelab. Backend is relatively simple to bootstrap with the docker compose (or, in the spirit of over engineering the hell out of this thing as I've done, helm charts exist and I've load tested ~50k devices on homelab k8s clusters running outdated consumer hardware).
The hardware has been a blast to learn here. I went from breadboard, perfboard, a flawed PCB, to a proper PCB with gerbers/BOM that I've had manufactured by JLCPCB. I'm an amateur here and likely made mistakes and absolutely welcome contributions: I literally learned kicad with this project and spent dozens of hours pouring over datasheets and landed on a PCB that still requires a Pi Zero W 2 but embeds the I/O (protos used Pico) with an RP2040 and the audio input with an onboard TI chip versus the Pi Codec Zero. I made a couple of mistakes documented in the errata, but it works with pretty minimal changes. I'm already working on a V2.1 that fixes those things, and another later revision that completely replaces the external transformer (turns out POTS delivered serious voltage to ring the bell). The dream is finding an embedded processor/memory that lets me ditch the Pi Zero W 2 completely and I have ideas, but yeah... hobby project, solo, doing this for fun and to give my kid a way to call his friends without the nonsense that landlines and helicopter parenting of 2026 (long story... my motivation for this project is written like a crazy person on the landing page).
I've got 10 functioning devices at the moment. It's a real thing, and I've got some friends with devices in their homes. It's got household linking. It's got a hardware enforced mic kill switch for privacy. It's got captive portal onboarding, factory restore, diagnostic dashboard, custom voice prompts, a bunch of themes for webapp, *69, and somewhere in there Towelie plays "funky town" if you dial the right number. Data for calls doesn't flow through the server (which you can self host, if you want); it uses all the fun WebRTC/TURN things for direct connections, even in weird NAT cases.
I welcome any questions and/or contributions if anybody is interested! I'm really just having a lot of fun building this and wanted to share!
justinlindh•14m ago
Just gonna drop a reply here because I'm actually genuinely curious.
I didn't use AI for this post and I never post here. I'm kind of allergic to socials in general aside from Reddit. So of course I'm curious about whether literally anybody sees it and click on `new`, and most of what I see is pure AI posts like HM has just become Moltbook for robots to sell things.
I'm genuinely not concerned about whether anybody sees my thing. It's a pure open source passion project. But I gotta wonder whether stuff like this just gets drowned out by the robots. Probably. Or my thing is just genuinely not interesting. That's OK, but man... I miss the days of IRC and USENET when people didn't have to try to differentiate between "did an actual person post this" and whatever we've got now.
If anybody actually reads this (likely not), just consider this my screaming into the void about how maybe the Internet sucks now.
justinlindh•1h ago
I'm a veteran professional software engineer, novice hardware enthusiast. I've created a project that I've named "Digits" where I wanted to play with doing both and learning along the way. So I did what one does and gutted a common retro phone knockoff and created an entire platform to create a private, end to end encrypted, self-hostable calling platform to accurately emulate phones from the '90s.
I am not selling anything and I do not intend to (I've got a great job already). The software and hardware are licensed AGPL-3.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0. I want people to build this and share it; self hosting is native, though I happily serve this for free from my homelab. Backend is relatively simple to bootstrap with the docker compose (or, in the spirit of over engineering the hell out of this thing as I've done, helm charts exist and I've load tested ~50k devices on homelab k8s clusters running outdated consumer hardware).
The hardware has been a blast to learn here. I went from breadboard, perfboard, a flawed PCB, to a proper PCB with gerbers/BOM that I've had manufactured by JLCPCB. I'm an amateur here and likely made mistakes and absolutely welcome contributions: I literally learned kicad with this project and spent dozens of hours pouring over datasheets and landed on a PCB that still requires a Pi Zero W 2 but embeds the I/O (protos used Pico) with an RP2040 and the audio input with an onboard TI chip versus the Pi Codec Zero. I made a couple of mistakes documented in the errata, but it works with pretty minimal changes. I'm already working on a V2.1 that fixes those things, and another later revision that completely replaces the external transformer (turns out POTS delivered serious voltage to ring the bell). The dream is finding an embedded processor/memory that lets me ditch the Pi Zero W 2 completely and I have ideas, but yeah... hobby project, solo, doing this for fun and to give my kid a way to call his friends without the nonsense that landlines and helicopter parenting of 2026 (long story... my motivation for this project is written like a crazy person on the landing page).
I've got 10 functioning devices at the moment. It's a real thing, and I've got some friends with devices in their homes. It's got household linking. It's got a hardware enforced mic kill switch for privacy. It's got captive portal onboarding, factory restore, diagnostic dashboard, custom voice prompts, a bunch of themes for webapp, *69, and somewhere in there Towelie plays "funky town" if you dial the right number. Data for calls doesn't flow through the server (which you can self host, if you want); it uses all the fun WebRTC/TURN things for direct connections, even in weird NAT cases.
I welcome any questions and/or contributions if anybody is interested! I'm really just having a lot of fun building this and wanted to share!
justinlindh•14m ago
I didn't use AI for this post and I never post here. I'm kind of allergic to socials in general aside from Reddit. So of course I'm curious about whether literally anybody sees it and click on `new`, and most of what I see is pure AI posts like HM has just become Moltbook for robots to sell things.
I'm genuinely not concerned about whether anybody sees my thing. It's a pure open source passion project. But I gotta wonder whether stuff like this just gets drowned out by the robots. Probably. Or my thing is just genuinely not interesting. That's OK, but man... I miss the days of IRC and USENET when people didn't have to try to differentiate between "did an actual person post this" and whatever we've got now.
If anybody actually reads this (likely not), just consider this my screaming into the void about how maybe the Internet sucks now.