[asterisk-users] Asterisk as a distributed paging system

[Sebastian]

On 09/22/2010 05:49 PM, Matteo Fortini wrote:
> I'm building a paging system composed of roughly 10 switches in daisy
> chain, with an embedded box with a speaker and a microphone for each
> switch. The embedded box runs my software.

I'm not sure if this is much use to your setup - but I've implemented a 
public announcement system (in UK sometimes called tannoy) using a pc 
and a pair of loud speakers. I used linphonec command line sip client - 
with auto-answer set. This has the disadvantage, of course, that it 
can't be used as a phone as well, to make phone calls from the machine 
driving the speakers (unless you install another sip client) - just as a 
speaker. You might be able to run linphonec on an embedded platform as 
well - with a speaker attached. I know there were some compiled for the 
NSLU2/arm platform already. You will have to combine it with Page() to 
get multiple nodes working at the same time. I only used one.

I did a write-up here - see if you find any useful information:

http://forum.voxilla.com/asterisk-support-forum/asterisk-public-announcement-system-loud-ringer-bell-49339.html

Sebastian

>
> I need the system to be resilient to any network partition, so that
> anyone can send announces from any mic to all the reachable clients. I'd
> need also to page a subset of all the speakers.
>
> I'm currently using some software I wrote which sends voice over
> multicast RTP and coordinates all the sites with multicast messages.
>
> I don't own the switches so each site will be assigned an address by
> DHCP, that's why I'm using multicast.
>
> I heard of asterisk and SIP as a possible alternative to my software,
> and I'd rather use tested and widely adopted software.
>
> Is there a way asterisk could be of use, or would I need to bend it too
> much?
>
> Thank you in advance,
> Matteo
>