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SKY- PE ak : Bridging Skype. Jamie Caudill Eastern Kentucky University. OUTLINE. I will talk about how I developed a system to use my home phone line remotely. I will explain the difficulties that I encountered and the promising opportunities for expansion that I discovered. MOTIVATION.
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SKY-PEak: Bridging Skype Jamie Caudill Eastern Kentucky University
OUTLINE • I will talk about how I developed a system to use my home phone line remotely. • I will explain the difficulties that I encountered and the promising opportunities for expansion that I discovered.
MOTIVATION • I plan to travel around the world. I wanted a way to call people back home. • I wanted to avoid the steep long distance charges involved with international calling.
INTRODUCTION • I had to become more proficient at using Arduinos. • I had never used some of the hardware involved. • I had to learn more about Arduino programming.
INTRODUCTION • I had to learn about phone systems. • How dialing is achieved. • DTMF • Pulse • How voices are modulated.
PROBLEM STATEMENT • Need a way to remotely dial numbers on a home landline and route the conversation through the internet. • Solution must use free services. • Solution needs to use a minimum of hardware. • Hardware involved must be cheap.
Assumptions • The Arduino needs access to: • A working phone landline. • A wired internet connection. • Residential electricity. • A device that has a web browser is needed to control the Arduino remotely.
SOLUTION • I decided to use an Arduino. • I had experience programming Arduino microcontrollers before. • They have add-on shields that address common needs. • I decided to use SKYPE. • Free service • Easy to use
SOLUTION (Continued) • I added audio jacks to a phone to bridge the connection between SKYPE and the landline. • Phone audio output to computer input. • Computer audio output to phone input • New SKYPE account was setup to automatically receive calls from my other SKYPE account,
SOLUTION (Continued) • I wanted to have the Arduino generate tones in order to dial phone numbers on the landline. • I could not get this system to work correctly so I used pulse dialing instead. • The phone connection is pulsed on and off in order to dial numbers. • This is how all phones used to work.
SOLUTION (Continued) • I used a relay to pulse the phone connection • It was controlled by an Arduino Uno. • I created code that could dial individual numbers. • I spent a week figuring out timings between pulses and during the peaks and valleys of the pulse.
SOLUTION (Continued) • I connected an Ethernet shield to the Arduino board. • This allowed me to connect the Arduino Uno directly to my home network. • I set up a web server on the Arduino. • I had difficulties because I had never done this before.
SOLUTION (Continued) • I programmed the server to read and respond to characters appended to the end of the server’s address in a browser. Server Address: Appended Server Address:
SOLUTION (Continued) • The server looks for the ? symbol. Then it individually reads the characters that follow and executes commands based on those characters. • “a” opens the line. • “z” closes the line. • “c” opens the line for one second before the dialing begins. • If a number is read, the corresponding number is dialed on the landline.
RESULTS • I was able to use my iPhone to call my SKYPE account at home. • I used my phone’s web browser to access the Arduino server. • I used an appended URL to make a call on my home landline. • I was able to talk to someone on my home’s landline using my phone’s SKYPE
CONCLUSIONS • I can now call, for free, friends and family from my hometown from anywhere that has a internet connection. • I learned a lot more about Arduino microcontrollers. • It was very interesting to learn how to control an Arduino through the internet. • I can apply this new knowledge to future projects.
FUTURE WORK • The dialing process involved turn a relay on and off in sequence. • The relay could be connected to any device and the coding could be changed to do whatever you needed the device to do. • This would allow cheap, internet-based control of any device.
REFERENCES • Caudill, J. (2013,May 10). SKY-Peak: Bridging SKYPE. Retrieved from http://people.eku.edu/chandrav/NET/Capstone_2013/capstoneProjects_2013.html