Open hardware telephony really can "connect the planet". Here is a article published on Next Billion that describes the possibilities for the developing world.

This blog post introduces the business and social possibilities of Open Hardware.

The designs are free as in speech, like Open Source software. Anyone is free to copy, modify, manufacture.

Recent breakthroughs mean that free software can now do most of the work in a telephone system, work that was previously done by specialised, expensive hardware. This means a dramatic drop in hardware prices is possible.

The IP04 is a 4 port IP-PBX that runs Asterisk and uClinux on a powerful embedded Blackfin processor. A very hackable IP-PBX based on open hardware and software designs. Assembled and tested IP04s are available from the Free Telephony Project Store.

There are two commonly used build systems for Blackfin Asterisk, Astfin and BAPs. Astfin builds a single image containing all software, whereas BAPs is a package-based build system (like apt-get or rpm). It is easy to move between Astfin and BAPS (they both use similar Makefiles), so feel free to experiment with both.

For Open Hardware/Blackfin Asterisk support there is a Blackfin Asterisk Forum and a Free Telephony Project mailing list.

The hardware page summarises the various open hardware projects.

Oslec is an open source high performance line echo canceller that outperforms the Zaptel echo cancellers used in Asterisk. Although developed for the Blackfin it is also in wide use on x86 platforms.

The Mesh Potato: The Mesh Potato is a 802.11bg mesh router with a single FXS port. Adjacent mesh potatoes automatically form a peer-peer network, relaying telephone calls through a community without land lines or cell phone towers. The Mesh Potato is designed using open hardware and software and is part of the Village Telco project. Lots of blog posts and progress updates on the Village Telco blog.

Codec2 is a 2400 bit/s communications quality speech codec that is free as in speech.

Thursday, December 24, 2009: David at Cebit: Thanks to Atcom, I will be attending Cebit in Hannover, Germany from March 2-6 2010 (Hall 13, E42). If you are attending Cebit please stop by and say hi.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009: Jeff and I have been busy testing PCB and wire Wifi antennas for the Mesh Potato. We have blogged about our tests on the Village Telco blog.

Sunday, December 6, 2009: The December 2009 issue of Linux Journal features an article on the Mesh Potato.

Thursday, November 5, 2009. Fluksometers in stock and ready to ship at the Free Telephony Store. Flukso is a web based community power metering system. The Fluksometer is a Wifi device that measures your household power using a sensor that clips over the mains cable in your fuse box. This blog post describes the Flukso system. Internally a Fluskometer closely related to a Mesh Potato, i.e. an Atheros router combined with a microcontroller.

Friday, October 30, 2009: LWN Article on Open Source Telephony Hardware. Features the Free Telephony Project and Village Telco/Mesh Potato projects.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009: Codec2 project kicks off! Codec2 is a 2400 bit/s open source speech codec. There are several blog posts (Part 1, Part2, and Part3) so far plus the Codec2 page and mailing list.

Saturday, July 4, 2009: Mesh Potato Testing. Would you like to develop on a Mesh Potato? We will soon have 100 beta units available for free to committed people with the best ideas, and are gearing up for the first volume production orders.

Tuesday, June 16 2009: Oslec news - Oslec in the kernel(!), Oslec/DAHDI installation, and sampling echo with Oslec/DAHDI.

Thursday June 11, 2009. First Mesh Potato Phone Call.

Monday, June 8, 2009: There has been a lot of progress recently on the Mesh Potato project. The FXS interface is running, the Asterisk channel driver written, and the prototype Mesh Potato hardware is being brought to life. The battle with the boot loader has been fought and won.

Friday, May 15, 2009: IP04 and Asterisk training course, covers basic dialplan configuration using command line and conf files. The course is discussed in this blog post on a recent visit to East Timor.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009: Low cost SLIC design kindly contributed by Manoj Desai.

Tuesday March 3 2009: The IP04 has been fully compliance tested and now has A-tick certification for the Australian market.

Wednesday Feb 24 2009: Video of Mesh Potato presentation at Linux Conf AU 2009. Due to microphone problems the audio is poor until about 4 minutes into the presentation. Also available are the slides. The slides contains links that explain how you can set up a BATMAN mesh network on your x86 Linux machine in just a few minutes - during the presentation the audience built a 12 node mesh while I was speaking!

Wednesday Feb 24 2009: Free Telephony Mailing List created. This list was created as some people prefer traditional mailing lists and in particular to assist some IP04 users in the developing world that have low bandwidth Internet connections. It is designed to complement the existing Blackfin Asterisk forum.

Tuesday Feb 23 2009: Video of a presentation from Linux Conf AU 2009 on Open Hardware Business Models.

Tuesday January 13 2009: Atcom have started a new Wiki for IP0X type products. Feel free to contribute!

Tuesday Dec 9 2008: After a productive and enjoyable couple of months we have just finished Milestone 1 of the Mesh Potato project. Check out Elektra’s post and my own post over on the Village Telco blog.

Wed, 22 Oct 2008: Wired article on Open Hardware featuring the Free Telephony Project.

Saturday, 27 Sep 2008: The Free Telephony Project is 3 years old! As I really don’t know how to have a good time I have written some blog posts to celebrate: one on the Family Tree of the project and another on how Open Hardware is developing.

Monday, Sep 22, 2008: Open hardware USB ATA. The Open USB FXS Project: An open hardware, inexpensive FXS board that connects to a PC via USB. Angelos is making great progress in developing an open hardware USB based ATA, building on the ideas of the $10 ATA and blogging as he goes. Nice work Angelos.

Saturday, Sep 13, 2008: The Mesh Potato project Kicks Off! The Mesh Potato is a 802.11bg mesh router with a single FXS port designed to give low cost telephony to the developing world. It provides telephony via VOIP while simultaneously facilitating a Wifi mesh cloud, and is an being built using open hardware and open software. The Mesh Potato is a key component of the Village Telco project and the development is being funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation.

Friday, May 16, 2008: Oslec News. Oslec has been chosen as the default echo canceller for Debian, and an Oslec development roadmap more.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008: IP04s are back in stock and ready for immediate shipping from the Free Telephony Project Store.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008: Jan and Bruce at VoipTel have developed a much improved version of the AsteriskNow GUI for the IP04. A robust GUI has been on the IP04 wish list for a while now, thanks Jan and Bruce for all of your hard work. Here are the installation instructions for the IP04 Voiptel GUI.

Monday, March 17, 2008: Alpha FreePBX port for Blackfin Asterisk! For the past month a group of developers have been working hard on an ambitious project - a port of the popular PHP/SQL based Asterisk GUI FreePBX to the Blackfin. This is really pushing the limits of Blackfin/uClinux platform - we have had to implement the equivalent of a LAMP stack on a uClinux box! We now have alpha level functionality: extensions/routes/trunks can be set up, and calls can been made on an IP04. The story of porting FreePBX to the Blackfin is described in this blog post.

Thursday, February 7, 2008: Jeff Knighton has implemented Caller ID (CID) for the IP04 by integrating Steve Underwood’s SpanDSP library with Asterisk. Great work Jeff, and thanks Steve. You can try it out with BAPS using the asterisk-spandsp package.

Tuesday, February 5: Linux.conf.au 2008 presentation. I recently presented on How To Build and Embedded IP-PBX. The presentation covers the Free Telephony Project work, with links to the slides and video. Scroll down to Session 3 in the LCA program.

Friday, December 28: Web server problems. This web site and blog has been down for most of this week. I am using a new host for the site, so there may be some teething problems. Please email me if you have any difficulty accessing the site.

Friday, December 21: BAPS released. BAPS is a package based build system for the Blackfin, like apt-get or rpm. It is especially designed to make user upgrades of software easier (no compiling required).

Thursday, November 29: IP08 Prototype. The IP08 has 8 analog ports, two Ethernet ports, and USB. Read all about the bring up of the very first IP08 prototype.

Thursday, November 29: Survey of Asterisk Apppliance products.

Monday, November 12: Mark and the team have made the first phone call on their BRI-ISDN Appliance. Read all about it on the Astfin Blog. I was thrilled so see all the inputs by a variety of people during the debugging stage. This sort of collaboration in hardware development is new and innovative, a real "breath of fresh air". Also the rate of progress is spectacular compared to traditional "closed" development methods.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007: An article on the IP04 has been published in EE times. The article discusses the IP04 design, the open hardware development philosophy, and Oslec.

Monday, November 6, 2007: An article on the Free Telephony Project hardware and software has been published in issue 2008 or Circuit Cellar (November 2007) Magazine.

Sunday, October 13, 2007: Primary Rate Appliance and Basic Rate ISDN Appliance projects announced! A team of telephony professionals have been working hard on developing some new Blackfin based Asterisk Appliance products. These new products are exciting new developments with BRI-ISDN and E1/T1 line interfaces. Hardware designs are complete, and prototype bring up will commence soon. More details from this post on the Astfin Blog.

Friday, October 12, 2007: IP04s back in stock! If you are interested in an IP04 please be quick - I have already sold half of this batch through back orders. Available from the Free Telephony Project Store.

Friday, September 7, 2007: mISDN support for OSLEC, the high quality open source echo canceller, thanks to Peter Schlaile. Thanks also to Kristijan Vrban for sending me some ISDN hardware so I can help with the ISDN/Oslec testing!

Sunday, August 12, 2007: The first batch of IP04s has sold out! New stock will be available in mid September. Feel free to pre-order now for September delivery. You can read all about the first batch of production IP04’s on my blog post Building an Embedded Asterisk PBX Part 4

Monday July 23, 2007: Production samples of the IP04 are now available for purchase from the Free Telephony Project Store. The production IP04s are fully assembled and tested and can be configured with any combination of FXS/FXO modules.

In September 2005 the first Asterisk phone call was made on the Blackfin CPU using the Analog Devices BF533 STAMP card. In December 2005 FXO analog support was added and the Free Telephony Project was annouced.

In October 2006 the 4fx analog port hardware was released which allowed experimenters to build a 4 port IP-PBX on a Blackfin STAMP platform.

The IP04 Four Port IP-PBX was developed in early 2007. The first phone call was made in April 2007 and with the kind help of Atcom production IP04s were released in July 2007 . The IP04 combined community-developed technology developed over the previous 18 months into a low cost, completely open IP-PBX. The IP04 is now a stable, proven design, with thousands of units in use all over the world. Many companies have adopted the IP04 design as the engine for their internal IP-PBX product development.

An high performance, open source echo canceller (Oslec) was released in June 2007. Oslec runs on both x86 and Blackfin platforms, and provides high quality, free echo cancellation to thousands of people around the world.

The Mesh Potato project kicked off in September 2008. In June 2009 the first Mesh Potato phone call was made.

The Codec 2 2400 bit/s speech codec started in September 2009.

There is a Blackfin Asterisk forum and Free Telephony Project Mailing List.

How To Build an Embedded IP-PBX presented at Linux.conf.au 2008 (links to slides and a video) is a good introduction to the project. Scroll down to Session 3 in the LCA program.

There are many blog posts on the project, that provide an easy to read introduction to the project. For example bringing up the 4fx analog (Part 1 and Part 2) and the experience of building and debugging a BlackfinOne DSP motherboard.

A 3-part series on Embedded Asterisk on the Audio DesignLine website, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The Linux, Blackfin, BlackfinOne, Asterisk, and gEDA communities.

Wojciech Tryc for setting up SVN, automated tests, BlackfinOne debugging, very helpful chat sessions and support. Thanks Paul Pastuszak for hosting the SVN repository.

Atcom for building the production IP04s. Thanks Alex Tao for his great work on IP04 hardware and software.

Mike Taht, Jean-Marc Valin and Marc Fribush.

Gideon Hack for advice and encouragement on project directions.

Rich Bodo for (i) encouragement (ii) interesting discussions on Open Hardware and (iii) hosting the Free Telephony web site and blog.

My wife Rosemary and children for letting me work on this project.

My parents Des and Helen for letting me work at their house when the above make it too noisy for me to work on this project :-)

Soa for donating test equipment.

The BlackfinOne team for their great work.

Telephonyware for generous deals on IP phones.

Yahel Ben-David, Jim Forster, and Alberto and Loiuse at IT+46 for helping me expand this project into the Developing world space.

Steve Song and the Shuttleworth Foundation for supporting the Village Telco and Mesh Potato project.