Skip to content

{ Monthly Archives } May 2007

My Honours Project – All done!

Well, as of Wednesday I have completed my Honours project. On Wednesday I gave my final presentation for the project and it went really well (at least for me). It is a great relief to have finally “finished” something which I have been working on for a good 10 months of my life.  I have spent the last couple of days recovering.

The day was way more stressful then it needed to be. I needed quite a bit of time to setup for my presentation (I need to setup 8 telephones at various locations and get the power supply and such working. However, the room I had been scheduled to give my presentation room which was being used all morning. It then took us ages to find a room which I could use, we ended up using the student study room.

The demonstration worked pretty well. I had two problems, but neither of them where significant or really noticed by the moderator or supervisor.

My documentation turned out pretty good too. I was required to produce two documents, the first was a “ Final Report” which covered what I actually did. The second was as a “Technical Document“, my supervisor suggested I do this in the form of a data sheet for my project. I’ve attached both the documents here for people to have a look over.

So where do I go from here? Most people just stop once they had done their final project. The University has some strange rules about collaboration on Honours projects, so I wasn’t able to do this project as an piece of Open Source Hardware. Now however that restriction has been lifted, over the next couple of months I hope to move it all to Open Source.

It also turns out that a guy working on embedded Asterisk lives just around the corner from me. I invited him along to my presentation and he is now helping me pursue getting this device on to the market.

At the current price point, it looks likes is it possible to do the 8 FXS channel USB device for around $US 300. Hopefully, we can get this down even lower, ultimately my end target is for it to be half that price. If you are interested in the device (either as a developer or as an end user) I would love to hear from you.

Almost there..

Well, I’ve almost finished my Honours project, less then a week left until it’s done. I have been working on this project officially for almost a year now, however it’s original inception occurred about 2 and a half years ago.

For those who don’t know, my project is to build a budget 8 line computer to telephone interface. My hope was to eventually be able to sell the device for $US 150, allowing somebody to interface a whole house cheaply. The design is nothing more then a glorified ADC/DAC device – the computer its connected to does all the work.

I have built a prototype board which is working a lot better then expected, you can see it below. I will however be glad when I can get back to just working on the board instead of writing all this documentation. Anyway, I should get back to it.

CFXS Try2 PCB Board