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.
{ 4 } Comments
hello
this is Yang in Prague. I have tried some USB channel bank in my asterisk. it doesnot work great.
If yours works with Asterisk, please let me know
Thanks
Yang
I have yet to finish the PC driver, but there is no reason that the channel bank shouldn’t work as well as a PCI device.
Keep an eye on the blog, I will post more as I get further.
So I know technically there is a difference but operationally, what is the difference from your project and this http://www.888voipstore.com/grandstream-gxw4008-pr-18541.html ? I am about to test these out for a multi line asterisk system, perhaps I will understand more soon.
-rob
Not a huge amount. When I started this project that device wasn’t available. My device is simpler so should be a bit cheaper if it went into mass production.
I am however working with David Rowe to convert the design to use only “easy to source” components, thus making it buildable by anyone.
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[…] at Adelaide University by a student named Tim Ansell. For his honors project Tim has developed an 8 channel FXS channel bank that connects to a host PC via USB, not unlike the Xorcom Astribank […]
[…] who either know me personally, or have read more of my blog might remember my final year honours project. The project was to build a budget 8 line USB channel bank. Originally, I had hope to commercialise […]