Recently I've been playing around a little with Asterisk and it was pretty easy to control ISY over the phone using a voice touch tone menu in the dialplan and some wget commands to talk to the ISY REST interface.

 

I also wanted to have ISY be able to control Asterisk so that the phone can be used as an alert interface. For example, when the doorbell rings, an Insteon contact closure input triggers an ISY program which calls a network resource. It is configured to connect to the asterisk manager TCP interface on port 5038 and send commands causing Asterisk to ring the phones for 10 seconds and display the caller id name "Doorbell". This is useful because it is hard to hear the doorbell in parts of the house (or yard/garage) but there are always cordless phones within earshot and they can be taken outside. Also the callerid log on the phones keeps track of when the doorbell rang.

 

The one issue I had was that the Asterisk API requires CRLF line terminations. So I had to use the TCP binary mode and write a little program to convert the text to the required format of decimal numbers with semicolons. But everything works and when someone rings the doorbell the phone rings. Many other things are possible but I just wanted to share a simple and yet useful example.

Hi az1324,

 

This is wonderful and thanks so very much for sharing this with us.

 

As far as CRLF, you might want to use the C encoding in the drop down (literally C programming encoding) in which case you can use \r\n for CRLF.

 

Do you have a link to how this was done in more detail that we can link to in our Wiki?

 

With kind regards,

Michel

Ah ok that works too with the C Escaped method. Good to know.

 

The setup requires Asterisk with the manager interface enabled. Don't really want to get into all the Asterisk stuff as there are other forums for that.

 

As far as the ISY side goes for ringing the phones, the TCP (C Escaped) command is:

 

Action: login\r
Username: asterisk\r
Secret: password\r
Events: off\r
\r
Action: Originate\r
Channel: SIP/extension\r
Context: doorbell\r
Priority: 1\r
Callerid: \r
Timeout: 10000\r
Async: 1\r
\r

 

Context doorbell is a simple dialplan that will just say "Door" if the phone is answered.

Thanks so very much az1324.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

Thanks for this info az. I hope to have my trixbox integrated to isy soon in certain ways, so this was nice to see.

 

Steven

Thanks for this info az. I hope to have my trixbox integrated to isy soon in certain ways, so this was nice to see.

 

Steven

 

I know this is kind of an old thread, but I have just got my ISY system up and running; now I'm looking for ways to make it work with my Trixbox. I have added a doorbell Fon interface with a SPA-3102 for doorbell/intercom functionality, but not anything else.

 

Anything you have learned in your integration would be appreciated!