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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 29th, 2023

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  • 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


  • one of the benefits of using a packet switched solution is that it’s expandable in the future… adding extra terminals anywhere there’s networking is pretty powerful - you can change your mind about location, or even technology in general and not have to worry

    … and it’s probably much easier to extend on in the future too - say open source AI assistants get better, you might want to build one that integrates with timers etc, that’s much easier with packet switched … or even more likely, you want to broadcast to the intercom from outside your house or even just make mobile phones able to be transmitters inside the house

    you’re totally right that simple point to point intercom stuff like that is a much simpler solution, but packet switched is king for a lot of future-proofing reasons - perhaps not something that OP cares about (a project completed is better than a perfect plan not begun), but worth mentioning






  • does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86

    afaik macos/rosetta is more efficient than native windows/x86, but that could be down to OS integration, or any number of confounding factors… i’d suggest though that x86 windows applications sometimes run better and more efficiently on alternative platforms, even with the translation layers - whether that’s down to the instruction set or a combination of factors











  • there’s certainly a camp in FOSS that considers “whatever you like including commercial activity” to be the one true valid version of “free software”

    like… if someone wants to take an MIT project, add a bunch of extra features to it keeping some available only with payment, and contribute back bug fixes and some minor features etc, i wouldn’t necessarily say that’s harming the project and this is overall a good thing? it gets the original project more attention

    like it’s perhaps a little unfair, but if the goal is quality and scope of the original project - or even broader of the goal is simply to have technology AVAILABLE even if it is with a few - then that goal has been met more with an MIT-like license than it would be with a copyleft license