Trixbox and home PBX systems
Recently, I have decided to get some IP phones and setup my own PBX system at home so that my wife and I can more easily communicate on the different floors. (Mainly when I’m down in the basement and shes on the top floor) I also had some added goals of having using the pbx system as an interface to my future home automation system, and then there is always the added bonus of becoming more familiar and learning about a different technology. I knew that asterisk is the most widely used/talked about free PBX system, but I had also heard about how difficult it was to setup and configure. This led me to search for an easier way or prepackaged system with asterisk.
Enter trixbox. Fromally Asterisk@Home, trixbox is a free CentOS based installation that comes pre-loaded with asterisk, FreePBX (the wui for configuring asterisk), as well as more custom wui aspects that make using the system much more user friendly. When I had tried setting up a custom system on my own, after an hour or two, I hadn’t gotten very far. Trixbox installed in about 30 minutes and as soon as it came up, all I had to do was add an extension and it was working!
So far, I’m really liking trixbox. I currently have a Cisco 7940 using the SIP firmware to connect to it, as well as a softphone for testing. Trixbox’s documentation seems to be were its lacking. It feels very hard to find, and rather lacking. The community forums have much more information, and you’ll probably be able to find your answer there, but it will take some digging. I plan on switching over the 7940 to using the SCCP firmware (as I like the features better), and trying to get that working with Trixbox, and eventually getting the whole thing to talk to the outside world.
G-speak
A seriously cool new interface and operating environment from Oblong.
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
Creamer Cannon
You might have seen the “Sawdust cannon” or “Creamer Cannon” on mythbusters,well I decided to make my own tiny version to play around with. The basic principal is the same as a pneumatic potato gun, except we’ll be shooting dairy creamer instead of potatos. Also, since there doesn’t really need to be much power to blow powder up in the air, I made the whole thing pretty small. The launcher consists of a 2″x6″ pipe for the compression chamber (filled by a bike pump, last time I do that), a electronic sprinkler vavle, and a soup can with a hole in the bottom to connect to the out flow of the valve. The valve takes 24V to open, and luckily since I just built my power supply with +12V and -12V, all it took was hooking up to those two lines to get 24V to operate the valve. I also added a air pressure gauge for good messure to make iteasier to know when to stop pumping -.-
Here is how it works, non-dairy coffee creamer is very flammable, but as with any fuel, you need to mix it with oxygen to make it burn. That is the purpose of the launcher, to disperse the creamer into the air. You could lite the creamer just by sprinkling it over an open flame, but using the launcher gives me more control, and allows for much more volume of creamer to burn. For our ignition source, we set a butane torch up, so that the flame from the torch was right above the soup can.
ATX Bench power supply conversion
I decided the most prudent thing to start building now that I have a worksapce setup was a bench power supply. Since I had quite a few old ATX power supplies from trashed or gutted computers, an ATX conversion sounded like a good choice.I found this instructable, which gave some good pointers and especially helped with figuring out which color wire goes to what. The only difference I made between the one in the instructables and mine, is the load on the +5V line. In the instructable, the guy uses a 10ohm 10W power resistor, I opted for two 1ohm 10W resistors in series after reading this. It seems that increasing the load on the +5V line increases the stability and level of the other output voltages. Here are some pictures of the completed power supply.
The geek den
Since we bought our new house, it’s been nothing but work. I really don’t mind the work, but it’s still work. Our house is a 3bd/3b, with one bedroom/bathroom on each floor, and it’s about 1700sqft. The deal is I get the bedroom in the basement as my work space, my wife gets the bedroom on the main floor for her own room, and then we have our master bedroom on the third floor. Well, the first day we move in, the basement floods. What had happened is the bank we bought the house from didn’t winterize the house correctly, and the water pipes to the spickets on the front and back of the house and burst, and as soon as I cut the water on, they flooded the walls, and the carpet. (I do have a video of the “leak”, maybe I’ll put it up). This started the first project, tearing out all the wet drywall/carpet fixing the pipes and making sure there was no mold build up. This took about a month. I also used this time to run ethernet and re-run some of the coax through the basement which is a big plus to have. But now we have a really nice basement with brand new carpet and new paint and everything is great. The next project was working on my room in the basement and getting it setup as my play/work area, and here is how it turned out.
The first thing I wanted, was a large working space (desk). I had originally used two old doors that were left in the house as the desk top, but they were hollow and dropped in the middle, so I replaced those with these pre-finished pieces of wood I got from Lowes for $30. The desk is supported on the wall by 2×4’s that are screwed into the studs, and by 4×2″ PVC pipes. I mounted the table-top about an inch away from the wall so I could get cables behind it really easliy, and I also drilled a few 2.5″ holes where the support beams were. I used caps to secure the legs to the desk so they wont kick out so easy, and used some male/female threaded adapters to make “adjustable” feet for leveling the desk. So far this has worked out really well and gives me about 22.5sqft or working space for about $50 of materials. I also got two 6′ power strips from my office that they were going to toss out that I have running behind the desk.
A big deal for me, was to have an area in my workspace totally devoted to building/modifying electronics. I thought it would be a good idea to have some more direct light for illuminating the workspace and found these wall lamps at IKEA for $5 each.These were great because the swivel and I can direct the light wherever it’s needed. I also found a 44 drawer storage container that I use for storing components/wire/equipment.
I also have my main computer in my room which is a new computer I built this past summer so that I could play newer games on it. It’s only really used for gaming/media.
I left the right side of my desk open for other computers for my wife to use when she wants to be down here with me or play games. I also aquired a slightly older dell small formfactor machine that I’m using as a linux server for running most of the services in my house (dhcp, dns) and it doubles as a repository (SVN) for a couple projects that I’m working on. I’m also using it to run a wiki (confluence). We’re not very good about filing our records, so I decided to use a wiki and make a digital copy of everything so it would be easy to find. It’s also really useful to have a central location for different account information (like for utilties), calendars and to-do lists, and all the important information on the machine gets backed up every night to a 8gb thumbdrive I got from Microcenter.
The last thing I brought into my room, was a 3′x6.5′ white board that my work was going to throw out. I also managed to find a whiteboard stand (albeit wasn’t made for a 3×6′ board), that I modified to hold the whiteboard. This is the only piece I have that my wife really doesn’t like ;p But I really like having it around, and it is my room 
So this is my work/play area now. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I’ve already gotten to use my work space quite a bit and it’s nice to work in. I’ve got a couple of projects already completed that I need to document and throw up here, so those should be up soon.
The geek inside
Things have finally started to come together, and I actually have time to start working on projects again. So I decided to turn my site back into a blog so I could document the different things I’m working on to share with others. I’ve already got a couple of things going, so there should be some content coming up soon.
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