Playing music for a predetermined time thru intercom system

General Help
1

We are an auto auction and We play music thru our PA system from 7:30 to 9:00 am every Thursday morning before the sale… I have just bought an ALGO 8301 to use for our intercom system…I thought that this device would do it but it does not have a auto shutoff… So I would have to load up exactly an hour and thirty minutes of music so it shuts off at the right time. Is there anyway thru freepobx or otherwise to make the music come on and off automatically or any tricks that anyone knows. Right now I just plug on ipod into our Algo and have to turn it off and on manually. Not a life or death issue just trying to automate it.

2

I’m not familiar with this device, but I assume you call a number that is associated with it and then upon dialing whatever you say in the phone will come out the speaker?

If so, it would be easy to program up a .call file along with a chron job that would run this file, which would trigger asterisk to dial a number and play a file. That file could be a 90minute long sound file. When the file ends, the call would automatically hang up.

I can write this up for you if you like. Just need a confirmation of how your paging system works.

3

Like a call-file, but a little different:

You can write an ARI-style script in PERL or PHP. Have the script run at a specific time and connect the call to your music source and your ALGO. When the ALGO answers, connect the call to your music. Get the “call ID” from the ARI interface and, in about 90 minutes, send a hangup() function to the call.

This way, you could set it up from a cron job, or you could connect it to a dial code.

4

I suggest a callfile solution, make a file /var/spool/asterisk/tmp/auction.call that contains:-

Channel: SIP/9998
Application: musiconhold
Data:auction,5400

and owned by asterisk , make the call files with

for i in {1..52};do touch -d last-thursday+7hour30min+${i}week /var/spool/asterisk/tmp/auction.call;cp -pf /var/spool/asterisk/tmp/auction.call  /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing/auctionps.call$i;done

delete the files in outgoing that are dated on Thanksgiving or other “off-days”