Block Telemarketers and Robocalls for Good with the Raspberry Pi-Powered Banana Phone

No one likes unsolicited and unwanted calls from telemarketers or robocalls from information-collecting bots, but putting a stop to them is troublesome enough that The FTC is offering $50,000 to anyone who can stop them. This DIY project, dubbed "The Banana Phone" for reasons you can see in the video, may very well qualify for the prize.

Here's how the banana phone works. When a robocaller or automated dialer calls you, the Banana Phone picks up, plays a song (in this case, it's Raffi's earworm we all know) and while the song plays, text-to-speech tells the caller to enter a four-digit passcode in order to be connected to the actual line they're calling. Automated dialers would give up at that point, but real humans would enter the number and get connected right away.

The Banana Phone cost around $100 to build, and uses entirely off-the-shelf products, including a Raspberry Pi and an Obihai phone-to-Ethernet adapter. Alex Ruiz, the man behind the project, explains and demos the setup in the video above. Alex has a landline and uses it to protect that, but we could imagine the system could be adapted for people who use a mobile phone or VoIP service primarily (although most of those services and smartphones have built-in tools to block unwanted calls anyway.)

He says it's worked pretty well so far, but it's obviously not a perfect solution to the telemarketer problem. For one, any human in a call center can listen to the instructions and enter the passcode to bypass it and get through to you?but considering most human call centers have automated dialers that only connect after registering someone picked up, it may be pretty effective there too. Of course, if everyone had one, marketing firms would find a way around it, but for the time being, it might be a fun DIY project and a decent way?albeit amusing to your friends and family?to protect your privacy.

The Banana Phone Project: The Evolution of Caller ID | YouTube via Hack-a-Day

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/L30uZAwdBio/block-telemarketers-and-robocalls-for-good-with-the-raspberry-pi+powered-banana-phone

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