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.
Look into Alphone, they have many different intercom products. I'm a low voltage electrician and could probably give you some actual companies to look into, besides Amazon.
If you have an ethernet cable out there you have quite a few choices, you could get voice/video very easily, or you can twist a few pairs together and get just voice. Truly depends exactly what you want.
Aiphone has a phone app, which can be run entirely locally which is what I prefer. Fuck cloud solutions.
I appreciate the info and the offer! I won't be messing with the Ethernet since that's used for networking. I was mainly looking to hook up an IP phone or something easy, but assumed I couldn't just connect that to my network and needed something so the two phones would tie together.
Esp32 is very suitable but they jumped through a lot of hoops to recreate the ESP audio development boards you can buy for very little money with all of those parts already built in.
I could I guess? What would that look like? Just mic and speakers wired over Ethernet and just always on but with a hardware switch or something? Or connected to something like a Raspberry pi running some software to talk with the other pi?
From Amazon, I found "IS543 5/4/3 WIRE INTERCOM STAT-PLAST"
It's similar to what we had growing up, 1 in the shed, 1 in the kitchen 1 in the game room, push the button of the location you wanted to talk to, only 1 direction of communication at a time, over.
I feel like you're making it way more complicated than it needs to be, why would you involve a switch or processor when you're just carrying sound waves? You don't even need a modulator, it just needs to connect a microphone to a speaker like cans on a string. Is it the highest quality? No, will it record your conversation for posterity? Also no. Will it let you tell at someone to get their asses in for dinner, absolutely