Spain-based Manu, who you can find on Twitter, needed to help his 96-year old grandmother communicate with her grandchildren. She is hard-of-hearing and not very tech-savvy, so having her use a mobile phone is a bit of a non-starter. To solve the problem, Manu built the Yayagram (Yaya means ‘Granny’ in Castilian) which uses a Raspberry Pi to communicate with the Telegram service.

The contraption is a box (as pictured) which connects Manu’s granny, via a jack cable, to her grandchildren and allows her to send voice messages to them by pressing and holding the red button. His granny, therefore, need only connect the jack cable to the appropriate grandchild’s port (or to the ‘send all’ port), record a message using the inbuilt microphone, release the button and away the message goes.

The grandchildren receive the message and can also send a reply (or an initial message) which gets printed out by the Yayagram using a thermal printer. Inside the box is a Raspberry Pi 4, connected up to all the peripherals and indicator LEDs over USB and GPIO.

Manu has found that the Yayagram has made his grandmother more independent, and, of course, more communicative with her family, especially in the times of COVID-19 restrictions.

You can read slightly more about the project, and see more photos, over on this Twitter thread.

Manu, his grandmother and the Yayagram