OpenPayphone
open-source guts for a 1996 coin payphone (Pi and SIP)
Details
- External ID
- 48436434
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- OpenPayphone
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- June 7, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 23
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7670765027322405
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- systems tools and desktop utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- vintage payphone emulator
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No The project involves physical hardware hacking, reverse-engineering 1990s coin mechanism pulses and hook switches, and integrating them via GPIO into a Raspberry Pi SIP telephony stack.
What it would actually take: Requires an electrical interface board (custom PCB or optocouplers) to read mechanical switch closures, pulse dialers, and coin validator signals from vintage payphone hardware safely into Raspberry Pi GPIO. The software stack uses Linux with Asterisk or a lightweight SIP client (like PJSIP) wired to a Python or C daemon handling state transitions (dial tone, coin accumulation, call routing). This requires embedded electronics expertise, soldering/circuit design, and telecoms protocol knowledge.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 605 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #140 of 606 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 214 days after the earliest competitor.
- Crate · hn · 2026-07-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- RP-Toolbox · github · 2026-09-11 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- crypto-payment · github · 2026-09-20 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- psstpsst · github · 2026-09-12 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- wetype-ime-linux · github · 2026-09-23 · 227 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- stelliberty_android · github · 2026-09-28 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- 8cryptdo · github · 2026-09-26 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Pdsink · hn · 2025-11-15 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.49
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Fintech yet.