UClinux based embedded asterix PBX

posted Aug 30th 2007 10:47pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: misc hacks, peripherals hacks

In my quest for a new VOIP setup (I’m hunting for a new sip provider – got suggestions?) I ran across an excellent project that’s been put together by [David]. It’s a four port open source asterix PBX that runs under UClinux. He derived the design from a BlackfinOne (A dedicated UClinux board). He covers building the IPO4 in four parts series that starts here. It’s probably one of the more intense open source hardware derived projects I’ve run across.

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Comments [11]

Reader Comments

That has got to be one of the coolest projects I have seen come out of here in a long time. Great find :)

Posted at 12:13 am on Aug 31st, 2007 by bikedude880

Suggestion: Broadvoice

They are a BYOD provider. I have been using them for about three months now and have had no problems.

Posted at 12:53 am on Aug 31st, 2007 by SLeighBoy

Pretty interesting project. I’d like to see more about the Layout though. Seems to be a pretty large board, but maybe he was fitting the connectors to a specific enclosure. I hope he actually used a 4-layer board for power and ground. Could be pretty important with all those long run signal lines. I guess it’s not a high speed device or anything though.

Posted at 11:30 am on Aug 31st, 2007 by Infinion0

Nice but it uses FXO and FXS interfaces. If you are going to do this at home you might not need those. Just use SIP phones and a VOIP provider.
A small Asterisk PBX is no big deal, you could build one out of NSLU, WAP, or even a GUMSTIX. Building one that supports FXO and FXS interfaces. That is the impressive part.

Posted at 12:52 pm on Aug 31st, 2007 by LWATCDR

I use sipphone.com, they’re the guys behind gizmo. It works rather well, has good quality calls, and offers stuff like inbound messaging, voicemail (if you don’t want asterisk to do it for you) etc. and it’s not very expensive.

Posted at 7:04 pm on Aug 31st, 2007 by Gabe

Picking a voip provider is a pretty specific thing. You need to find one with DID service in your area, plus a rate schedule that works for you.

If you travel at all, IAX2 is a much better protocol for connecting to your provider than SIP because of the firewall issues. Plugging a SIP phone into a random network isn’t going to work out well most of the time. Unfortunately, IAX2 based devices are few and most are poorly built.

I’ve had excellent experiences with Broadvoice, Voicepulse Connect (connect.voicepulse.com), and Vitelity. I’m using * as part of a commercial service offering for fire departments (second signal) and find these providers to be reliability and generally of good quality.

Voicepulse is the least configurable — they’re good but rigid.

Posted at 8:45 pm on Aug 31st, 2007 by Andrew Pollack

broadvoice hands down, been using them for 1.5 years, support for asterisk, much better quality and built in features than i had with other sip providers (email notifications, almost real time billing, unlimited calls to landline calls in europe as well as us/canada). i’ve had no outages. this project looks great, fantastic find will!

Posted at 6:34 am on Sep 1st, 2007 by fbz

didn’t you mean asteriSK ?

Posted at 8:13 am on Sep 1st, 2007 by jc

I know it is off topic…
What is the newest monitor you can uses for a EVC output … and help would be apperated.

Sam

Posted at 10:35 pm on Sep 2nd, 2007 by Samuel

I’m using http://www.axvoice.com/ as my voip provider. I have my asterisk server tied into two different accounts that I have with this company. So far they have been great! Here is an article on using axvoice with asterisk. (http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=76).

Kevin

Posted at 1:52 pm on Sep 4th, 2007 by Kevin Fonner

I use gradwell.com who are pretty good, but aaisp.net will offer you every kind of voip service under the sun and they’re cheap too!

Posted at 4:54 pm on Sep 13th, 2007 by markp