As part of my internship this semester, I’ve been working with Shawn Van Every and Tom Igoe on establishing a connection between Asterisk (an open source telephone system) and networked objects. The basic goals were to make it so that you could control an object with a telephone and so that a telephone call could be triggered by an object. Below is some video of the basic system in action.
In this video, you can see that the buttons on the phone are used to control which LEDs are lit up. Here, pressing the button on the circuit board triggers a phone call.
ITP-centric notes on how this works can be found here. I’m using what I’ve learned in a project called Botanicalls where plants are able to make phone calls to express their needs.
