VOIP Phone Integration

When people successfully badge into the space, a tone plays and a message appears on the VOIP phones in the HAM/electronics room and elsewhere in the space to let people know somebody's arrived.

The first 2 phones are the Grandstream GXV3240 model: [[1]]

The software for this runs on poquito which is an ancient (ca. 2011?) Raspberry Pi. Some of the software packages and such on poquito are out of date, the upshot is efforts to update things like versions of Python etc can be 'shaky'. The only reason I mention this is because there is a Python module called python-ESL [[2]] that seems especially nicely suited to handling SIP/phone stuff, but we could not install it via pip. In addition to python-ESL, Kevin discovered a command line tool, SIPPing [[3]] that creates and sends SIP packets albeit in a less clean and ideal fashion.

It is worth noting that historically as we become aware of security issues that would affect poquito, we apply necessary patches. Not everything is latest and greatest, though.

On poquito, in /home/pi/Bloominglabs/bots, there are two files: sipping_template.txt and sipping_func.py. The first has the packet format, the second has a function that 'wraps' SIPPing.

net_doorbot.py (in the same directory) is 'doorbot', and dosman put some machinery in place that does checks to make sure it's running. As far as integrating SIPPing, just:

import sipping_func

which you can then call when you want to announce somebody has arrived:

sipping_func.announce_arrival('test person')

'import' working depends on /home/pi/Bloominglabs/bots being in PYTHONPATH. Or you can just do this:

import sys

sys.path.append('/home/pi/Bloominglabs/bots')