How I Built an Apartment Buzzer for Multiple Roommates

http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2010/06/how-i-built-a-multi-user-door-buzzer-for-our-apartment/

by danielle17 • 16 years ago

132 35 16 years ago

daniellemorrill.com

full disclosure - I work on Twilio, which I used for this

danielle177• 16 years ago

full disclosure - i work on Twilio, which I used for this

tomjen32• 16 years ago

Ok, next time could you indicate that you use a restricted service in you headline so those of us who can't get Twillo can skip reading about it?

catch23• 16 years ago

One could always just use a Twilio equivalence in your country. Twilio might look easy, but it's just as easy rolling your own with something like Adhearsion. Just sign up for some cheap origination/termination services and you're ready to roll your own twilio service. I use iCall for origination & VoipJet for termination here in the US; my asterisk & adhearsion stack runs on a small cloud server at rackspacecloud.

danielle177• 16 years ago

Any other disclosures I should add about my startup? Oh, you have to pay for the API too... OMFGBBQAFKBFF4EVA

we are working on international support, stay tuned

gkoberger3• 16 years ago

Danielle- hopefully it's just a coincidence, however I emailed you exactly this idea (and outlined the implementation almost exactly like you just did) about a year ago (our email conversation about it began on 7/7/2009; we met prior to that at the GigaOM VIP party).

trevelyan• 16 years ago

Do you normally send people ideas you hope they won't implement?

sangaya• 16 years ago

I hope that it's not a coincidence. A pretty neat idea was provided for nothing a year ago and has been doing nothing but sitting around in the two of your heads. Danielle brushed the dust off, executed, and shared the results.

What did you do with it?

I'd say this is a timely example of the "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." mantra from just the other day.

sstrudeau• 16 years ago

This is really cool! When I was in the roommate situation, we just posted buzzer codes composed of dots & dashes next to each name.

moolave2• 16 years ago

Oh, the awesome possibilities you can create with Twilio API. =)

pvdm• 16 years ago

What are the chances that Twillo will take an Uzi to it's API users ?

http://twitter.com/cdixon/status/14636556473

progrium• 16 years ago

Considering that Twilio is purely a platform company (even more so than Amazon Web Services, since they primarily have an online store to run), this seems very unlikely if not entirely impossible.

cmelbye• 16 years ago

I would be surprised if you said otherwise, considering you're a Twilio employee.

danielle177• 16 years ago

hey progrium they do disclosures around here, stop coding and update your profile =)

jluxenberg• 16 years ago

Since they're using Twillo, it now costs $0.03 to enter your apartment plus $1 per month for the phone number.

Food for thought. Does anyone know if Twillo does sub-one-minute billing?

danielle177• 16 years ago

Nope, Twilio doesn't do fractional billing.

I can report back on how much it costs me to run this thing after a month. With 5 people coming and going average of 2 times per day each, I expect it is going to come out to around $0.30 per day x 30 days plus the $1/mo for the phone number -- so roughly $10/month... we'll see how close my guess is

sachinag• 16 years ago

I love how the top story on Hacker News reminds me that I owe Danielle an e-mail after TC Disrupt to get myself a Twilio t-shirt. :) waves at Danielle

danielle177• 16 years ago

waves shipment goes Wednesday, make sure to get your address to me before then

vault_• 16 years ago

Wow, that's extremely cool. I remember checking Twilio out before, but I didn't quite get what the use case might be for it. This example has managed to flick on a light switch in my head, and I see that with a platform like this you could build some amazing applications. I will be playing with it more in the future.

patio112• 16 years ago

I love Twilio, let me count the ways. Doing flow control of an online or offline process from a phone is awesomely powerful. (Particularly cell phones.)

Here's a related example which I'm busy coding today: I wanted people to be able to record custom appointment reminders, but (following many years of supporting non-technical users) think microphones and MP3 encoding are probably beyond their ken. So instead, when you click "Send Mary Smith a custom reminder" on the site, it pops up a lightbox saying "Call 555-123-1234 and type in the code 1234", and when you do so the phone will say "Leave your custom message for Mary Smith's appointment on June 16th from 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM after the beep." Then, after doing so, your lightbox automatically closes and you get visual indication of success.

Bonus points: registering new numbers in Twilio is so cheap that I can trivially afford to give every customer their own call-in number, and tell them to put it on speed dial. Then I can use the same basic pattern for any number of tasks.

moolave2• 16 years ago

Awesome idea. Do you have a link to this? Would be cool to see it.

patio112• 16 years ago

http://www.appointmentreminder.org for the service. Should launch publicly in July. I will disavow all knowledge of comments about forthcoming features should priorities change during development ;)

blasdel• 16 years ago

You've still got the user interface backwards — you shouldn't have to present a dialog with a phone number for the user to dial, your app should simply call the user when they click a button.

Amazon does this as a confirmation step when you sign up for AWS, and most of the interactions in Google Voice are based on this model.

eapen2• 16 years ago

Nice usage!

At my place, I have a group ("Gate") set up in Google Voice which forwards the number to my cell phone and if I can't access my phone, then the custom voicemail that caller hears is the DTMF key ("9" in my case) sound and so if I am not able to get the phone, it will automatically buzz them in.

mattmillr2• 16 years ago

So anyone who dials your apartment gets through the gate?

eitally• 16 years ago

No, only the people dialing from numbers he's added to his "Gate" group in GV.

eapen2• 16 years ago

This is a bit late.. but yes, anyone who dials me (and if I do not answer the call will be able to enter). If I do answer the call, I can just end it without pressing "9" to make sure they cannot get in. Since my T-mobile connection is spotty, I would rather not have my guests stuck outside and am willing to take the risk (although a persistent criminal would be able to enter the complex anyway).

klous• 16 years ago

Archive of twilio contests, looking at these can be useful to generate new or related ideas. http://contests.twilio.com/archives.html

How I Built an Apartment Buzzer for Multiple Roommates

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