Asterisk

Recently, I participated in a discussion about using Asterisk on the Raspberry Pi, to provide a call filtering facility for a home installation. My correspondant had tried to set up a Raspberry Pi and VoIP handset to handle phone calls such that incoming calls would pass through a whitelist/blacklist, promoting good callers and damning bad callers, while directing outgoing calls to their intended destinations.

In the year and a half since I wrote IP04 Progress, I've expanded my simple telephone system into something a little more comprehensive. I had three goals in mind; to provide that "complete accounting" of incoming and outgoing calls that my provider wouldn't supply, to manage the incoming calls so that I would be less bothered by telemarketers and other annoying callers, and to position the IP04 as a part of a much larger home automation project.

I've slowly worked my way towards all that, in fits and starts, and am ready to share some of my progress.

For years, I've played with my 4-port embedded-linux Asterisk PBX (the IP04 from rowetel.com). Now, I've finally decided to move it out of the toychest and into real use.

For a long while, I had put aside my IP04 to concentrate on other things. Recently, I resumed my explorations of the IP04 device, still with the long-term notion of using it as a home PBX.

I'm glad for the extended absence; it allowed me to reconsider my approach, and (when I resumed playing with the IP04) do some things that I had previously found impossible to do.