The mesh core team is very pleased with recent development in VOIP using Asterisk and the new small footprint boards. We had a very successful demo of this at Austin Summerfest in June. Many people saw the demo in the presentations and later dropped by to try it out on our display table in the vendor area. We are developing a concept of a single device bringing many functions when you plug it in. Asterisk, chat server, web server and NTP (time server) all work separately on both the Pi and BBB. We need to get fully configured images posted for download for your MicroSD.

It is easy to post a link to the web server page as an advertised service. This could easily be the starting point at a mesh deployment. New mesh user opens his mesh status page and sees a web page like "Event briefing" showing on a different node. Clicking on it, he opens the page in a new browser window, learns that Asterisk and chat are also on this node and points his chat client to the chat group on that named server. Chat is useful since it contains a scroll window. Any question asked and answered an hour ago is still there. You just roll backward to it. The IP address of the server for asterisk is needed to set up your phone. You see the server name and IP address in the briefing web page, get an extension from the asterisk admin and you have a phone. It is helpful to have the config files for the phone already loaded on the server. We did this recently but sending a list of MAC addresses to the asterisk admin. Those were spun up into phone config files for our 7940 models. When the phone was initially set for the correct TFTP address, it found asterisk, loaded the files in the TFTP root and got a complete config. The admin had also set the phone extension up in the asterisk server. Booting the phone connected it to its own host node, jumped across the mesh to the asterisk server and went online.

While the phone stuff is happening, your node has picked up the correct date/time from the NTP hosted by the Pi or BBB. Many of the USB connected GPS pucks that are sold for mapping programs work fine as a position and time source. K5KTF had already modified some of his status pages to show location. A bit more work could easily show distance and bearing if your node and one of the others in status page both had location data.  We want to include distance/bearing in a future mesh firmware version. Some details need to be worked out, but these are functions easy to deliver together in the same small footprint server.

73 de NG5V