Raspberry Pi FreePBX project

Hi Everybody,

Right now I’m working on a university project with a pretty tight deadline. I’ve got an idea of how to build it but I’d like to pass it by the experts on this forum to get their feedback and clarify a few assumptions. Any help is much appreciated here!

As a bit of context, this is occurring on a local wifi network with no internet connectivity. In a nutshell I’d like to do the following,

  • Have one Raspberry Pi act as a hub, running FreePBX (http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/).
  • Hub will start conference calls and add multiple other pis to calls.
  • Hub should be able to also kick other pis off the call in a controllable manner.
  • Hub can record calls
  • Non-hub pis act as softphones; they receive calls from the hub and auto-answer.

Here’s some of the questions I’ve got regarding this setup:

  • Is a PBX necessary? Is there a simpler route to achieve this?
  • I plan on building a client to do all this for all devices using either (https://github.com/asterisk/asterisk_rest_libraries) or (http://sourceforge.net/projects/iaxclient/) is this the standard approach to doing something like this, or do more mature libraries exist? Are these libraries able to do what I need?
  • Do all devices have to run asterisk? Can I run a client based on the above libraries without having to install asterisk on the device?
  • For recording, if I use the feature code "In-Call Asterisk Toggle Call Recording", roughly how many mb/sec do the saved files end up?
  • For the auto-answer, I hope to use the advanced settings module "Force All Internal Auto Answer" and have other pis act as extensions that I can set auto-answer on. If other pis are running FreePBX, can they act as extensions in this manner?

Thanks again for any help.
Cheers!

I believe PIAF (PBX In A Flash) has already done all or at least most of it… Google them…

www.pbxinaflash.net to be more precise !

I guess I should add that I need to do a bunch of other custom stuff using that hub, separate of the PBX system, so I really do need to code up a client.
I’m a bit confused as to where PIAF fits in here. Can it act as an asterisk client that can start/receive calls, or is it specifically for the hub?

RasPBX is a fully functional 35 dollar PBX, hub is not really appropriate here.

Read up on SIP and SIP signaling as part of your project and read the wiki here to save other people having to read it to you.

When you have done your homework you will find that you can communicate with an asterisk instance on a TCP socket on 5038 hich a well constructed client can communicate with using the AMI and thus build the other half of your project.

“RasPBX is a fully functional 35 dollar PBX, hub is not really appropriate here.” Sorry dicko.
Thanks guys.

Hi Everyone,
I am a newb… to the forum and i like to do research before i post some help.
I have just installed pbxinaflash on a new raspberry pi. when i change the lan ip from dhcp to static i have no more a WAN ip.
If i place the settings back to dhcp i get the WAN ip back. Am i missing something or when i change the setting from dhcp to static i need to add also the WAN ip somewhere? If so where ?
i used the command and also gui via webmin.

Thank you so much in advance for any help.