Telephone Ringer Repeater Helps the Elderly Avoid Missed Calls

Elderly folks tend to be the only ones still using landline phones these days, but they're also the demographic most likely to experienced issues with their hearing. Telephone ringers are loud, but they're still easy to miss if you're on the other side of the house and have hearing loss. It would be great if the phone's ringer could sound throughout a house without requiring any complex setup or high costs. To achieve that, Giovanni Aggiustatutto built this wireless repeater system for telephone ringers.

Like a Wi-Fi repeater, this extends the "range" of telephone ringers. An octogenarian can put the base unit next to the phone and the repeater unit elsewhere in their home. Then whenever the phone rings, the repeater will ring, too. Both units also contain LEDs to provide a visual indication of an incoming call.

Aggiustatutto wanted this system to be as easy as possible for the user to implement, so it doesn't require any modification of the phone or phone system. The user just has to place the base unit near their telephone and plug it into power, then place the repeater unit wherever they want it and plug that into power, too.

This works because the base unit detects ringing by listening through a microphone — no hardwired connection necessary. If it hears ringing, it lights up its LEDs and tells the repeater unit to start ringing, too.

The target audience may not even know their Wi-Fi credentials, much less how to flash those to a microcontroller. So Aggiustatutto put an ESP8266 Wemos D1 Mini development board in each unit. Those run the ESP-NOW library, which allows for direct Wi-Fi communication between the two boards without going through a local Wi-Fi network router. This means that there isn't any configuration necessary to use the system and it will work as long as both boards have power and are within range of each other.

Both units have simple, unobtrusive 3D-printable enclosures and the electronic components can be populated onto strip boards. So the build would be easy for someone to complete for a grandparent.