All The Good Ones Were Taken

Landline Call Screener

I was tired of answering the phone to scammers. If I was at the PC, I could glance at the phone's caller display, and if I didn't know the number I'd search for it online to see if any of the 'whose number is this?' websites had heard of it. This seemed like a thing I could automate.

I already had a Raspberry Pi on the desk, running as a home web server and suchlike. I already had a Unicorn Hat HD, which I'd bought on the assumption that I'd find a use for it sooner or later. I didn't have a dialup modem that could do caller ID, but I found a cheap US Robotics USR5637 online.

A Python script listens on the serial port, and looks up incoming caller ID numbers, first in an internal list of known numbers, and failing that it scrapes details from a website. I'm not going to say which website, and I'll be keeping the scraping code to myself. They might overlook one person doing the occasional automated lookup, but I don't want to encourage other people to do the same.

Where to Get It

Source code is coming soon, once I've separated out my personal list of known phone numbers and the web-scraping code.