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Open Lounge Phone

Introduction

A free, open-source, screen-free phone. Big mechanical buttons, one per person, and nothing else: no browser, no games, no strangers.

  • Kids’ phone — calls only the contacts a guardian approves, respects quiet hours (callers get voicemail with a transcript instead of waking anyone up), and reports its battery level.
  • Lounge phone (later) — a shared booth phone you take over by scanning a QR code, which forgets you the moment you walk away.

The browser phone emulator ringing, with its developer panel

Open Lounge Phone is “batteries included”: deploy the backend to your own free Cloudflare account or self-host it with Docker on hardware you control. Nobody — including this project — sits in the middle of your calls.

Status

Section titled “Status”

Phase 1 (software, runs on ordinary computers) is in progress.

Milestone What State
M0 Monorepo, CI, licenses done
M1 Wire protocol + core logic (access control, quiet hours, call state machines) done
M2 Self-hosted server, browser phone emulator, companion app — first real call done
M3 Cloudflare backend (Workers, Durable Objects, D1, TURN) done (local; see docs/cloudflare.md)
M4 Kids’ features: invites, passkeys, voicemail + transcripts, richer device status done
M5 One-command deploy CLI, desktop app (Tauri) with USB keypads next

Later phases: Lounge variant → ESP32-S3 firmware on dev boards → custom PCB → wireless product. See docs/architecture.md.

Layout

Section titled “Layout”
packages/protocol   wire protocol (zod schemas) — the contract every device speaks
packages/core       pure domain logic shared by all backends and devices
packages/db         SQL migrations + typed store (Cloudflare D1 and SQLite)
packages/server-app backend-agnostic HTTP API, connection gateway, household call hub
packages/client     browser helpers: socket, WebRTC call media, tones
apps/server-selfhost Node server (+ Dockerfile, compose.yaml with coturn)
apps/device-web     browser emulator of the phone (keys, LEDs, status display, handset)
apps/companion      companion PWA for guardians and contacts
firmware/           ESP32-S3 firmware (later phase)
hardware/           KiCad PCB and enclosure (later phase)
docs/               architecture and the generated protocol reference

Try it

Section titled “Try it”
Terminal window
npm install
npm start

Open the setup link the server prints, create your household, then open http://localhost:8787/device/ in another tab. That’s an emulated phone. Press Space to lift its handset and it reads out a pairing code; enter it in the companion app, then call each other. See docs/self-hosting.md for Docker and HTTPS.

Development

Section titled “Development”

Requires Node 22+.

Terminal window
npm install
npm test            # unit tests
npm run check       # lint + typecheck + tests (what CI runs)
npm run docs:protocol   # regenerate docs/protocol.md after changing packages/protocol

License

Section titled “License”

Software: AGPL-3.0-or-later. Hardware designs: CERN-OHL-S-2.0. If you run a modified Open Lounge Phone server for others, you must share your changes.