I wanted my son (two and half years old) and his friends to be able to talk any time, but he's not *quite* ready for an iPhone. So I designed the Toddlophone.
This is based on TalkKonnect. TalkKonnect is one of many Mumble-based IP radios. Mumble is a free voice chat program that does voice chat very well. I host my own Mumble server at home, and all the Toddlophones connect to it.
TalkKonnect was by far the best client available for me. I also tried:
- Writing my own Python based Mumble client based on Pymumble - this didn't work out because the bridge between Pymumble and ALSA was way too brittle
- TalkiePi and various forks - this was not kept up to date and wouldn't work with the Linux kernel's updated Raspberry Pi GPIO interface
- Running the GUI Mumble client on XFCE / Raspbian - this was too much for my lowly Raspberry Pi W (the original 1.0 W) to handle
Ultimately TalkKonnect proved to be perfect, it just took me a while to find it. The XML configuration is excellent; on the onset of the project I knew I wanted a push-to-talk switch and three LEDs for status (online, broadcasting, and are there other participants). The configuration happened to let me specify GPIO pins for exactly this purpose. So if you're looking to build something similar in 2026, abandon these other projects like TalkiePi. The prepared TalkKonnect OS images were perfect - I could skip all of the compiling and just edit the XML, and it worked right out of the box. At my son's friends houses, I just put a wpa_supplicant.conf file in the boot partition and the Pi would connect automatically.
As usual I designed my own enclosure in TinkerCad. The device is powered with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, though pretty much any SBC would work. I connected a micro USB breakout to the 5v line to simplify the design. I used cheap generic USB DACs connected to simple 3.5mm phones.
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