I've been thinking about turning a Linksys WRTSL54GS into a video phone.

Wanna help?

Basically, I would load OpenWRT on it, hook up a USB sound card, USB
camera and USB flash.  Install Asterisk and use the console (or I
guess a GUI-less softphone) for audio IO.  Wait... the asterisk
console doesn't support Video.  Scratch that, I would need an open
source linux video phone that's willing to run without a GUI.  Hmm,
maybe this is more complicated than I first thought.

Oh well, my other plan is to improve upon this cool thing:

http://yasha.okshtein.net/wrt54g/

by using the WRTSL54GS.  Then it could support Video, flash drives etc.

Think about the cool things you could do with that platform:

1)  A rolling phone with a literal 'follow-me' feature.  You could put
a particular coloured patch on yourself and have it follow you
optically (lots of work) or you could walk around with a wistle of a
particular frequency and have the system turn based on the relative
strength of the  sound in the left and right (and maybe a couple
other) microphones.

2)  Include a GPS and it could seek out good wifi reception in your
area then act as a repeater for your WIFI phone.  (Spouses and room
mates, hide your vegetable steamers)

3) Think about what you could do if you had 3 or more of them.  With
the router and linux for brains, a GPS for self-locating, the wifi for
inter-unit communication, you could get them to follow you around like
little ducklings.  They could be semi-autonomous and a bit
collaborative.

Rough cost:
Router: $125
Car: $100
Camera: $10-$80
USB Flash: $30
USB HUB: $10
USB Sound: $25

So, for a few hundred bucks, you've got the makings of a cool robotic
Asterisk platform.

Think about a _very_ proactive IVR running around asking if it can
help people at a public event.

Then, once you've proven the concept on that scale, we can go
Mythbusters style and hook it up to, say, a VW Beetle.

Does that get the ol' creative juices flowing?

Other than that, you could take a look at the bounty list.  There is
some TTS stuff there that's up your alley.  The bounty amounts are
ridiculously low "Full IPV6 Support: $200", but at least somebody has
posted it so that collection pot can start to fill up.

Dave

On 1/23/07, Simon P. Ditner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So, I find myself sitting here with some fairly good open source
telephony tools and plenty of work that's time consuming, but no
intellectually challenging problems to solve... Anyone have any brain
teasers?

Cheers,
spd

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