Call MeMaybe

Your child wants to call a friend after school. You want that too. A shared home phone gives them a place to make plans, tell a story, or call Grandma without borrowing your smartphone.

Choose a simple handset, set up the people who should ring through, and give friends an extension for the right room. Add abedtime for the handset when the day is done. Friends can use ordinary phone numbers through your provider; they do not need to install Call Me Maybe.

A good fit if someone in your household is comfortable maintaining a small Linux phone system. You choose the hardware and carrier, edit configuration files, and look after updates and account credit. A ready-made family phone service may suit you better if you want app-based setup and one company handling support.

The lobby screens incoming calls. It is not an approved-contacts-only outgoing dialer: outside a configured curfew, the supplied dialplan allows ordinary US/Canada-format numbers. Handsets vary; choose one without the apps or screens you are trying to avoid.

This is a supplementary phone that depends on power, internet and a configured provider. Keep another way to reach emergency services.

Known numbers can ring through; other callers hear the lobby and can enter an extension. Caller numbers are normalized before comparison, so formatting differences do not send Grandma to the wrong door. Caller ID can be spoofed: this is call screening, not proof of who is calling.

Ten seconds sounds generous until you watch someone read a number off a card. The window is ten seconds to the first digit, then three between digits — so a confident caller is through in two seconds and a fumbling one still gets a fair shot.

A six-digit code exposed to the phone network is a million combinations: ample against a person, thin against a machine that can redial. So after three failed calls in an hour, a number skips the greeting entirely and goes straight to “Good day.” — no prompt, no dial window, nothing to work against.

The PhoneBrain registers outbound to your VoIP provider, and incoming calls ride that registration back in. No port forwarding, no inbound firewall rules, no dynamic DNS. The only connection crossing your network edge is one the Pi opened itself.

Asterisk does SIP, RTP, and tone detection, because it is very good at those and there is no reason to write them again. Everything aboutwho gets in lives in doorman: one static Go binary, talking to Asterisk over loopback. One call is one goroutine, and a caller hanging up cancels a context that unwinds the whole thing.

It is also its own operations tool. It will tell you what your configuration adds up to, show you how a caller ID normalises, and hand a language model the entire config surface as JSON Schema.

Once the handsets are registered, they get the toolkit a small office PBX has had for thirty years. It turns out to be a remarkably good fit for a house. Each one has its own page — who it is for, and what it replaces.

One brain. One handset. Your house, on the line. Start small and add a phone in another room whenever you like.

doorman has no opinion about brands. Anything that registers over SIP works, so buy on ergonomics and price. The type matters more than the model: wired desk phones never surprise you, DECT is the right answer for cordless, and an ATA means the phones already in your house may need nothing bought at all.

For the PhoneBrain — a Raspberry Pi or MiniPC — one choice is worth being rigid about: use wired Ethernet. Wi-Fi jitter on the box handling audio is the difference between a clear call and someone sounding underwater. Then put it on a small UPS — a house phone that dies in a power cut is worse than none, because you thought you had one.