Well… Appraently I did it again. It’s been almost exacly a year since I posted anything. To be fair, this blog was designed from the beginning to really be a place that would not get many posts, just mostly stuff that I think would help others or things I did that I thought were really cool. That and I have been pretty busy over the last year, so while I have done some cool geeky stuff, I might come up with something that I have learned or done that I could write about.
Anyway. Apologies aside, as you can tell from the title, today we are going to talk about hacking the new Allstar 3 project. And by hacking, since it is an open source project, I mean “Let’s dig into somethings about it that I want to change to make it fit my needs/wants and fix some issues that I see in it.” That’s the beauty of Open Source and why I like it.
A few of my friends have asked me about ASL3 and my thoughts, so I decided it was time to take a look at it. I am perfectly happy with my current install, but if I can upgrade it, that would be awesome. If I could get it on a Raspberry Pi and have it stable, that would be better still. That way I could free up a box for something else.
So Allstar itself has been around for MANY MANY years and it was starting to age out. Thankfully some of the people involved decided it was time to moderize it and update it to be more compatible with newer operating systems. There were alot of things broken with it prior to now, like for example, if you updated the OS of the box you had it running on, it would break the dahdi kernel and you had to go in and rebuild it and other things. It was a pain, so many people just never updated the box (for example, my production system is still running on Ubuntu 20.04). So the fact that they took it on and have brought it up to modern standards is absolutly fantastic. However, there were some decisions made that I don’t agree with, but since I don’t contribute to the project, I can’t complain too much about it. All I can do is make changes to my own implementation of the system since I control that. I can also make decisions about how I handle the installation process.
For example. It was decieded that what they call their PI Appliance is a Rapsberry Pi image that runs ASL in a VM…. I’m sorry…. what? There is ZERO reason that a VM should be run on a Raspberry Pi. Thankfully they have a way to install it on bare metal as well, but I don’t understand the thought process behind the VM thing.
But that is a small issue compared to something else I found that I REALLY don’t agree with and take a bigger issue with.
While reading through the documentation, I found a small blurb buried on a page that they are collecting data from your ASL system and sending it back to them. Yep. It was about a sentence long that says they collect “Anonymous” data for the purpose of “Adoption and Performance” statistics. And then give a link to a github repo, which BTW is not the actual implementation of the stats gathering.
So I dug a little more into what “anonymous” data they were collecting and turns out that it is NOT actually anonymous. Truly anonymous data is data that does not have identifying information in it that can link the data back to a person. For example, a survey at work. If the first thing they ask for is your employee id, it’s not anonymous. “Well we won’t see it”. Well someone can and it can be traced back… so yeah.
In the case of ASL, this is an example of the data that they are collecting:
RANDOM_UUID = d56da682-f200-4307-a97c-e67ab393c69c
ASL_AST_VER = Asterisk 20.7.0+asl3-1.3-1.deb12
ASL_NODES = [ 460181 ]
ASL_HTTP_NODES = [ 460181 ]
ASL_IAX_NODES = [ ]
ASL_CHANS = [{ "460181" : "SimpleUSB" }]
ASL_UPTIME = 1:8:22
ASL_RELOAD_TIME= 1:8:22
OS_OS = Linux
OS_DISTRO = Debian
OS_RELEASE = 12
OS_KERNEL = 6.6.31+rpt-rpi-v8
OS_ARCH = aarch64
PKGS = [{ "allmon3" : "1.2.1-2" , "asl-apt-repos" : "1.4-1.deb12" , "asl3" : "3.0.0-3.deb" , "asl3-asterisk" : "2:20.7.0+asl3-1.3-1.deb12" , "asl3-asterisk-config" : "2:20.7.0+asl3-1.3-1.deb12" , "asl3-asterisk-config-custom" : "" , "asl3-asterisk-dev" : "" , "asl3-asterisk-doc" : "2:20.7.0+asl3-1.3-1.deb12" , "asl3-asterisk-modules" : "2:20.7.0+asl3-1.3-1.deb12" , "asl3-menu" : "1.3-1.deb12" , "asl3-pi-appliance" : "1.5-1.deb12" , "asl3-update-nodelist" : "1.2-4.deb12" , "dahdi" : "1:3.1.0-2" , "dahdi-dkms" : "1:3.3.0-5+asl" , "dahdi-linux" : "1:3.3.0-5+asl" , "dahdi-source" : "" }]
Do you see the issue with the “anonymous”part? Yep. They are collecting your Node numbers from your system. Sure they are putting a Unique random GUID in the payload, but your node numbers are in the payload too. Those numbers can then be used to trace back to who owns the system AND not only that…. the data is being posted online! Yep. And it shows all the needed and good information about your system like kernel version, os version and many other things that a bad actor would love to have to get another machine on their bot network. And the kicker. No option is provided to opt out of this data collection. I had to dig into through some code to figure out how the data was being sent to figure out how to disable it myself.
Now, of course, we all know you need to make sure to secure your own system as best you can. Have a firewall, don’t expose too much of it to the world, only what is needed for connections and other things. But this kind of really pisses me off. Granted, in the grander scheme of life, this data collection is not something that is sending REALLY important information about anything, like passwords or bank accounts. What I am upset about is the principle of the idea.
What upsets me about this is:
Yes many other pieces of software collect this kind of data. But in most all cases, you have the ability to opt out of it. If you don’t there are other ways to block that data from being sent home. But in this case, there is a simple way to do this.
And now we get to the crux of this post. I am offering a way for you to opt out of sending this data.
Since I only have one x86 box that I can use for ASL and it is currently running my production ASL system, I installed ASL3 to a Raspberry Pi. So the platform I used for this testing is:
Along with other various pieces of software to ssh, burn the card, etc.
You modify any system at your own risk. If something goes sideways, I am not responsible for it. This is here for informational purposes, so make sure to verify things as you go.
Once I had all the components together, I burnt the most recent Raspbian OS to the card, stuck it in the Pi and let it boot, updated the OS and then Installed ASL3. I followed the instructions in their documentaion to install on Debian and those instructions were pretty simple to follow.
Once I had ASL3 installed, I walked through the configuration process that they recommend, which is using the asl-menu script. For basic configuration, it works well. For me, it’s too basic. Since I can edit the conf files directly, I will do that on my next install. I have some more advanced things that I do with my system, so configuring it myself is not that big a deal. For regular Joe Ham who doesn’t want to take the time to learn Linux, the asl-menu is perfectly fine.
Once I had everything configured and rebooted and had the system up, I tested to make sure it was connecting to the ASL network and I could send and receive connections. That confirmed I had an operational system. Then it was time to break it…
Note that you can do the process below before you setup the connection to the ASL network. That insures that none of your data is sent once you have configured your connection.
I will not bore you with the process I took to find out how it was sending the data, but needless to say, I finally found the script and service files that are run to send the data.
Btw the script if you are looking for it is called asl-telemetry in the /usr/bin directory. Take a gander at it. It’s actually pretty slick on what they did.
I started looking at the script, but found how they were validating some things and decided it would be to much work to rip out the code and change it. It is just easier to disable the script.
So. To do that. There are two files in the /usr/lib/systemd/system directory called asl-telemetry.service and asl-telemetry.timer. We need to make these go away.
Create a new folder to hold the service files in, incase you would want to go back to sending data at some point:
mkdir asl_telem_service_files
Next we are going to move the files from the systemd/system directory to our new directory
sudo cp /usr/lib/systemd/system/asl* asl_telem_service_files
sudo rm /usr/lib/systemd/system/asl*
Now check to make sure they are gone and in the new directory:
ls /usr/lib/systemd/system/asl*
ls asl_telem_service_files
On my installation, these were the only two files in the systemd directory that started with asl (I checked first) so I was able to use the wild card to move them all at once. You may want to check to make sure this is the case on your system as well.
And there you have it. With the 2 service files moved out of the systemd folder, systemd will not be able to fire the script and your data will not be sent to the servers.
Yes, I understand that this all seems petty, but the principle of it is what is important. I strive to make sure my data and information is only shared with places that I want it shared, and I have strived to make sure that I am in control of that data. I choose not to use services like Google (gmail) or Yahoo for example so they don’t have my data. In this case, the fact it was buried and that the anonymous part of it was false really kind of torqued me. So yes I decied to find a way to make sure that I am in control of the data.
This will not effect the functioanlity of your ASL system. It will just allow you to opt out of “anonymous” data collection. Which is a privlege that everyone has to keep their data private.
Till we meet again……
]]>First off, let me apologize. It has been over a year since I put together a post for this blog. But I have been busy with life and some projects have fallen to the side just due to time. That is the thing about this blog. While I am not totally dedicating myself to it, it is more of a place for me to document things that I think are fun and neat and some projects that will help others out. However, I have been developing some smaller things and I do have one that I think is cool and would like to share.
As you can see by the title, this project is the combination of 2 projects that I have worked on over time and really turned out to be something cool.
I have been gaming off and on since about 2006 when I started playing World of Warcraft (yes I am that old school Warcraft). About a year after I started, I purchased a gaming keypad. This is a device that you plug into the computer and it is basically a shrunk down keyboard that you can map the keys on to do certain functions. This has numerious keys and buttons and a direction joystick on it that allows you to keep one hand on it and one hand on your mouse. That way you are not searching around to keys on your keyboard during a big battle or when flying a plane for example. It let’s you focus more on your screen versus having to rememeber where all the keys you want are. At the time I had a Razer Nostromo and it served me well over the years up till recently. I noticed a few months ago that some of the keys were starting to stick and some would not reliably work and that was a problem.
So in August, I purchased a new keypad and upgraded to a Razer Tartarus V2. I say upgraded as the Tartarus has 5 more keys and RGB LED lighting. Basically, it is the upgraded version of the Nostromo. The lighting on the Tartarus is awesome. I can set the gaming profiles for different games and the keys will light different colors based on the game. I can even go so far as to program the lighting to make each individual key or set of keys different colors. The Nostromo had 2 light settings on it. On or off. This Tartarus lets me do all sorts of things.
Last year, I wrote about how I started using the Nostromo to help with Home Automation and one of the things that I did was setup a keybind to toggle my meeting status light. I have a light that I put together with a Raspberry Pi, a Blinkt! LED light hat and Python that I use to let the rest of my family know when I am in a meeting or not. Since working from home, this has proved itself invaluable time after time. When I got the Tartarus, I setup a key map to do the same thing. But I always felt I could do something more with the lighting on the keypad.
And that is what brings us to now.
Using a combination of Python, Home Assistant and time, I have been able to not only mirror the light setting for the meeting light with the lights on the Tartarus, I also have been able to incorporate the CheerLights project into this project so that the lights are always changing. It’s pretty cool during the work day to see the light change from green to red automatically as I am in and out of meetings and then change colors in the evening and on the weekends while gaming.
So let’s jump right into how I did all this.
One thing to note. This is more of a description on how I did it then a walk through to help you make it. Everything will be different for other people so I am going to try to keep these as generic as possible in this post. I may look at doing a deeper dive into how I setup HA to do all the things with the CheerLights Project.
There were some steps that were already done and a few others I needed to do to make this work.
Since I already had all of this done, this part was easy.
Using some Python I wrote, A few years ago I created a meeting light, as I mentioned earlier. This light uses a Raspberry PI Zero W and a Blinkt! LED hat and is mounted to the door frame outside the room (our bedroom). What this light does is if it is green it means that I am not in a meeting or on a phone call and it is ok for anyone to come in and red means that I am in a meeting and can’t be disturbed. This is really useful over the summer when my little one is home, so that he knows if it is ok to come in to ask me something or whatever.
Using Home Assistant, I can automatically turn the light on and off and change the color based on when I am in a meeting or not. This has been working well for about 3-4 years. To do this, I ingerated my iCloud meeting calendar into HA and the light will change when I have an event schduled at a time during the day. So when the meeting event starts on the calendar, the light changes to red. When the meeting event is over, the light will sutomatically change back to red.
But there are times where I am pulled into a meeting or a phone call and do not have it scheduled. I have a button setup on my gaming pad that when I hit the button, it toggles the light color.
However, one of the things that up till recently I wish I had was a way to have an indicator on my desk other then the dashboard in Home Assistant to indicate what state the light is in. While looking through HACS a few days ago, I came across a new integration that someone wrote that allows Home Assistant to integrate with the Razer Chroma API that runs on all the Razer devices that support the Chroma API. Razer Chroma is a way for your Razer gaming devices to set colors based on events or profiles or games.
I loaded this integration into Home Assitant and was able to get it to connect to my device. Once that happened, all I needed to do was to create 2 new Scenes in HA. One for Green and one for Red. Now when Home Assistant tells the Meeting light to change depending on meeting status, it will also activate the appropriate scene to set the color on the Keypad.
Now when I am in a meeting, the whole keypad is lit red and when I am out of a meeting it is lit green, mirroring what the meeting status light outside the door is doing. It also turns the lights off at night and automatically in the morning on working Days.
But what about in the evening or on weekends? Well that is where it gets cooler.
One of the projects I have been privledged to contribute code to is called CheerLights. CheerLights was started about 10 years ago by Hans Scharler and I have been playing with the project for a while myself. I love the idea of anyone anywhere being able to send a color on Mastodon or Discord and everyone’s lights who has built a CheerLights project will change to the color. Basically, when someone chooses a color, lights all over the world will change to that same color. It is fastinating to think about.
For a while I have been using Home Assistant with the Virtual Components integation to turn the CheerLights devices I use on and off, but that was the extent of it.
Using the Chroma Integration, I now have added the ability to read what CheerLights colors are coming in and react and send the correct color to the Tartarus and the keypad changes to that color.
What I did was create a few more scenes in HA to cover all the possible colors that CheerLights supports. I have had a sensor in HA for CheerLights that tells me there what the current CheerLights color is. This information is pulled off my MQTT Broker that I setup earlier. This allows me to have one source of truth on my network to control what all the lights are doing. I used that sensor along with an automation that uses a choice action to determine what scene should be activated. When CheerLights changes, as long as it is not in the middle of the work day, the color of the keypad then changes to the current CheerLights color. It is kind of fun and trippy to be gaming in the evening and see the keypad change color right under my hand. It really has added a new level to my gaming.
And there you go! Using all these integrations and scenes, I now not only have a visual indicator on my desk for my meeting light, but I also have elevated my gaming by tying in CheerLights to the system as well.
I am planning on doing a post about all my CheerLights work and how I make it all work together in the future.
]]>As of August 2023 I upgraded to a Razer Tartarus V2 and have retired the Nostromo. This article still applies and things work the same, but the old war vetran of many many virtual battles needed to be retired.
I used to play alot of online games. And I mean alot! There is about 8 years of my life that I dedicated (read: was addicited) to World of Warcraft. So alot of gaming time. When I was hardcore gaming though, I got my hands on a Razer Nostromo Gamepad. If you don’t know what a gamepad is (also called a speedpad or gaming keypad) this is a little device that has a directional thumb wheel to help you move around and any number of keys that are right under your fingers. Basically, this, paired with a mouse, allowed you to cast your spells and run around without having to take your fingers off the keys. It helped with spell rotation and helped to speed up timing for example. You didn;t have to search the keyboard for the keys you needed since they were all right there under your fingertips.
Over time, my priorities shifted and I got away from gaming as much, but stilled played some video games here and there. Recently, my Brother-In-Law convinced me to download and play a game he had found called 7 Days to Die. It’s a post zombie apocalypic survival crafting game (think Minecraft meets The Walking Dead meets an MMO). It’s kind of a fun game, but the controls on the keyboard were a little cumbersome. So I remembered I still had this Nostromo kicking around in a box and dug it out. Now I am playing this new game with this old game pad.
But now I have this additional peripheral living on my desk. I start looking at it the other day and thought to myself “Can I use this for other things other then gaming? Would this be useful in my work?” And then I realized, yes I could. For example. It’s been almost 3 years since most of us started working from home. Some of us permanently. But since we also have families and meetings to balance, many have come up with a variant of a meeting status light to tlet the other people in the house know that now is not a good time to come ask Mommy/Daddy for a sandwich. I even built a variant of my own using a Raspberry Pi, Blinkt! hat, MQTT and Home Assistant. While I can make it automatically change using Home Assistant when I get into a Zoom meeting, there are times where I need to manually kick the light when I answer the phone.
So for a while I was just clicking a button on a computer screen or using my phone or the Alexa sitting on my desk to change the color. But I needed a quicker way. And since I had a hunk of computer equipment with ALOT of programmable buttons on it, I thought it would be nice to be able to hit a button and have the lights change.
So now during the working day, I switch keybind modes on the gamepad and I can use the buttons to fire automations in Home Assistant that let me control not only the meeting light, but my desk lamp, and other lights in the house, all with the push of a button. After work, when it’s time to game, I just switch keybinds again to the correct profile for the game I am playing and I am off to killing zombie hordes.
This will work with other gaming pads no doubt, but since I have a Nostromo, that is what I am going to talk to in this article.
Sadly, the Nostromo I have is not supported on Linux. Newer versions of the pad are, but this particular one is to old to work. Plus, all the open source Linux Drivers/control applications I found did not support programming the keys. They only supported controling the RGB lights on the devices. This Nostromo I have only has one color light and it is usually off unless I am playing late at night. So this for this project, I had to leave my gaming machine living in Windows. But that is a sacrifice I am willing to make for the advancement of cool geeky stuff.
After getting the Razer Synapse software installed on my gaming machine for the Nostromo (which is a seperate machine on my desk from my primary computer and work computers), I started looking at the software and found that you can set the buttons to be programmed to launch applications. This is what gave me the idea to go down this path. Knowing the Home Assistant can use Webhooks as triggers for automations, I created a set of batch files that are triggered based on the button pressed. All these batch files have in them are curl commands to touch the Webhooks in Home Assistant, which in turn fires the automation that toggles the switches.
Lets look at one example of an automation I created for this. The example I will use is turning my desk lamp on and off.
The first thing I needed after setting up the Razer Synapse software, was a set of automations with Webhook triggers in Home Assistant. To do this:
Trigger for Webhook and gave it the Webhook ID of jeff_desk_lampCall Service, Toggle Switch and then chose the switch for my desk lamp.Gamepad - Toggle Jeff Desk Lamp so I knew what it was later.Webhook ID field. By doing this, you get the whole URL. In the lastest verison of Home Assistant, there is a little copy icon at the right hand side of the field. Clicking this will copy the webhook URL to your clipboard (it will be similiar to http://10.0.0.1/api/webhook/jeff_desk_lamp or whatever ID you gave it.)Keep this webhook URL you will need it in the next step.
Now I went in and created a new batch file on my Windows Machine (I called mine toggle_jeff_desk_lamp.bat) and in this file all I have is one line that looks like this:
curl -X POST http://10.0.0.1/api/webhook/jeff_desk_lamp
This is a curl request to post a request to the URL of http://10.0.0.1/api/webhook/jeff_desk_lamp that I copied from Home Assistant in the Webhook ID Field.
That is all that is needed at a minimum for this to work.
Once I had the batch file setup, I went into the Razer Synapse software, set the keybind map to the one I wanted to use for automations, then I selected the key I wanted to assign this new function to, selected Launch Application and then found the batch file I just created. As soon as I hit save, the button was programmed and ready to go.
At this point I just hit the button on the pad and the light turned off. I hit it again and it turned back on.
And that’s it. It was a super easy solution for a task that I wanted to complete. After I created that automation, I created more to turn other lights on and off from my game pad. Now I have quick, easy control over things in the house and I am utilizing a piece of computer equipment that is already living on my desk now. I was really excited at the possibilites for this.
This has peaked my interest in trying to find other ways to use this. There are so many possibilities to be able to include this into my work flow.
Enjoy! Till next time!
]]>Tech has always been my number one hobby. I always have liked playing with computers and gadgets. Remember how on my homepage of this blog I mentioned that I have many other hobbies? I have always looked for ways where I can incorporate tech into these hobbies as well, beyond just using a GPS to find a great fishing spot or that really cool campsite off in the woods.
Within the last few months, I have started smoking meat. I have always wanted to try it and for Fathers Day of 2022, my wife and son bought me an electric smoker. I’ve done all sorts of meats in it so far. Brisket, pork butt, chicken. I still have some ribs to try and want to try a ham and a turkey at some point. But one of the biggest pain points that I have run into so far is the constant maintenance of the tempurature of the chamber. Unlike wood fired smokers, I don’t have a fire I have to tend to, but I do need to make sure I monitor the temps of the chamber and the meat itself to make sure things are cooking properly. I had a cheap little multi-probe thermometer that I used to monitor it all, but the thing was, I constantly had to get up from what I was doing, go outside, check the temps, adjust and then do it all over again 15-30 minutes later.
So for my birthday this year, my loving wife got me a Tenergy Solis iBBQ Bluetooth Smart Thermometer. This one I can use bluetooth to connect it to my phone and get notifications on temps and also check the temp in real time of the meat and chamber. But since I am a geek, while that adds to the geek factor of smoking meat, I wanted to do more. Enter Home Automation.
I have been using Home Assistant (HA) to run some automations in the house for a few years now. Things like lights for example. So I wanted to tie this new thermometer into HA to be able to see everything on one dashboard, show graphs of the temps so I can see if the temps are on the right course and get notifications on when temps have reached certain things and also set reminders to check on things like wood chips or temps.
By tieing this into HA, I can now leave the house if I need to, leaving my wife here to make sure the house does not burn down of course. But if I need more supplies like wood chips or sides for dinner, this frees me up to be able to do that since I can see the dashboards outside the house and setup notifications to Discord in HA. Once I walk out of the house and get far enough away, my phone will of course disconnect from the Thermometer, so it is useless if I get to far away.
The goal of this article is going to be less a step by step walkthrough like I have done previously, since everything I am doing is already documented online very well, but more of a discussion and the path I took to get to where I am at and links to the things that you will need to be able to do this as well.
One of the other things I want to point out is, the method I used is also useful for other aspects of home automations. As long as a sensor or device uses bluetooth, I can pull the data into HA and use it for other things too. So this method also has uses outside of this, which is awesome.
Also my usual Disclaimer: You modify your systems at your own risk. If something goes sideways, it is not my fault.
I would like to point out one thing before we get started. I have my own Home Lab setup here and have multiple servers and multiple Pis. I run alot of Microservices in Docker on an old Desktop that I converted to a server and that is where my Home Assistant and Grafana live. However, I just wanted to point out that if you are starting from scratch on all of this, the Raspberry PI 4 I have mentioned can run ALL of this. Docker, Home Assistant, Grafana, etc… it can all run on it. In fact, before I got this server a year or so ago and moved all my container infra over to it, I was running everything on this PI 4 that I am using now. So it will handle it.
I started this project trying to use another project called CloudBBQ. It is supposed to do basically the same thing as Theengs, but it is geared more towards specific uses. However, try as I might, I could not get it to work. Not saying it’s a bad project, but after spending 3 days fighting with it, I felt there had to be a better solution.
Theengs Gateway is a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) decoder. It has alot of bluetooth devices that it can decode already, and more are being added, but this does read ANY bluetooth packet it can hear too. It just may not be able to decode them is all. Keep that in mind as we go through this.
The Theengs website documents how to get this going.
Now that Theengs Gateway is running, you will need to find the topic where the data is being sent.
Find a good MQTT client (I recommend MQTT Explorer as it organizes things and makes everything easier to see and is cross platform) that you like and connect it to your broker. Once connected, look for the Theengs topic you created and subscribe to it.
Now watch for a data packet that has the information about your Thermometer. It should be its own topic based on the MAC address of the bluetooth radio of your thermometer. You are going to need to watch everything coming across to identify the correct one for your thermometer. Unless you can look up your MAC address for your Thermometer.
I let the gateway scan at it’s default so I can get the temp data is as much real time as I can get it, which I think is every 5 seconds and as often as the thermometer can send the data. Since I use my own broker and the data does not go outside my network, I am ok with that much data hitting the broker all the time.
Now we need to parse the JSON to get the probe data that is being sent to MQTT. I chose to use Python for this and I put the script up on Github that I created to do the parsing. You can use it as a base to see how I did it for the Tenergy that I have, but of course, you can use whatever you are most comfortable in. Javascript, C, even Node-Red would work with this.
Basically what I have done is my script listens to the thermometer topic that we found from Theengs Gateway, parses the probe data out of it and then sends it back to MQTT on a set of different topics, one for each probe. I also push the data to a MySQL database table. I will explain next why I do this.
The script can be found at: https://github.com/n8acl/smoking_scripts
Now that I have the probe data going back out over MQTT on their own topics, I setup sensors in Home Assistant that can see those topics and then displays the temps in guages so I can see all the probes.
The Dashboard I set up shows me the weather, all the reminder and notifications switchs and the probe temps and the graph I created so I have one place to see it all.
Speaking of graphing the temp data, I chose to use Grafana for this. Using the time series data I push to MySQL, I can see the history of the probe temps over time. This allows me to guage at a glance at how fast the meat is cooking so I can adjust cooking temps if I need to.
I can also later pull the history of the cook to see at the end about how fast a certain temp settings this particular hunk of animal took to cook so I can plan later cooks.
One last thing I needed is to get notifications on things so I can stay on top of the cook. For example, if the chamber temp goes over 275 or under 225 I can get a notification or when the meat hits say 150 and I need to wrap it.
There are multiple ways that I can accomplish this:
If you choose to use a different programming platform, you can also choose to use that to send notifications. Whatever you choose to use, you need will need to get notifications to stay on top of things.
And there you have it. That is how I have automated my temperature monitoring for when I am smoking meat. This will really help my future cooks and help free me up to help out in finishing dinner in other aspects. Plus it adds a nice geek factor to another one of my hobbies.
Hope you have a successful smoke as well!
Enjoy! Till next time!
]]>Remember the days before cellphones of having an actual phone in the home connected to the wall and you had to stretch all the cables so you could make phone calls that your parents couldn’t hear? Well with the market for liquidated IP phones becoming popular, those days are back. There are so many uses for a VOIP phone system in the house now. Not only can you bring in your own home phone number now and put as many extensions as you have ports on your switch, you can even tie in your cellphone so you can actually get calls while out and about away from home. Another cool feature you can have is room to room intercom or even whole house paging. Dinner ready? Pick up the phone, activate the intercom function and you can let everyone one know it’s time to eat.
There are so many uses even out side of that. Use in the Ham Radio space has become very popular of the last few years. There are multiple services now being run by many volunteers strictly for Hams and by using your own PBX at home, you can tie not only any incoming commercial VOIP systems into your PBX, you can also tie these Ham Radio ones into it as well. This lets you pick up your extension on your desk and make a call to work, make a call to your family or even make a call to a fellow Ham Radio Operator all with the push of a button and you don’t need multiple lines to do it.
But what if you don’t want your phone ringing off the hook all the time. If you work from home for example, it’s completely understandable if you don’t want one of your Ham Radio buddies being able to call you, or you don’t want Aunt Matilda the Gossip to call you at 11:00 at night when you are laying in bed and getting ready to fall asleep or you want to make sure that no work calls come through on the weekends. Instead of having to remember to hit the Do Not Disturb button on all the phones, you can set up FreePBX to automatically route all incoming calls during certain times to voicemail or some other destination. And the cool part about this is you can do it based on where the call is coming from so you can basically disbale all Ham Radio calls during work but allow work calls and home calls through. I call this “Auto Do Not disturb” (herein after referred to as AutoDND).
Let’s take a look at how to do it on FreePBX.
For this Project you will need:
Also a Disclaimer: You modify your FreePBX setup at your own risk. If something goes sideways, it’s not my fault.
In order to do this, we need some modules installed in FreePBX to add this functionality we are talking about. Depending on your setup or the distro spin of FreePBX you are using, you may already have the needed modules installed, may have some of them, or have none of them. In any case, you will need to install them if you don’t.
In order to install these modules, you will need to log into your FreePBX admin GUI and click on Admin and then Module Admin.
You will then need to install the following modules, in the following order (some of these modules depend on others being there before they can be installed):
For this to work for you, you will need to double check to make sure that your server time is set correct for your location. This will make sure that things are compared to the correct time for your time zone and also make sure that it follows Daylight Savings Time.
SettingsAdvanced SettingsPHP TimezoneAmerica/New_York for example)After getting all of these new modules installed and verified your server time zone is set, you will have two new selections under the Applications menu: Time Groups and Time Conditions.
First we need to setup a new Time Group for our AutoDND.
ApplicationsTime GroupsAdd Time GroupFirst we need to give it a description so that we know what this is for. I would suggest AutoDND since that is what we are using it for.
Now comes the tricky part. How do we set up the time groups properly. This tripped me up at first trying to figure out how this worked. This is not like setting a recurring event in a calendar app. So if you set from say 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM but you want it every day, if you try to set it for Sunday to Saturday, it won’t work.
So what you will need to do is set it for every 24 hour period you want within a week. And you can set a whole week in one Time Group… Let me give you an example:
I want my AutoDND to be in effect from 10:00 PM at night to 5:00 PM the next evening. Basically, I only want to receive calls between 5:00 PM and 10:00 PM each day. SO for my first time group, I set:
Time to Start: 22:00
Time to FInish: 17:00
Week Day Start: Monday
Week Day End: Tuesday
So from 10:00 PM Monday night to 5:00 PM Tuesday evening, this would be in effect. Now I can hit Add Time near the bottom and do the same thing for Tuesday:
Time to Start: 22:00
Time to FInish: 17:00
Week Day Start: Tuesday
Week Day End: Wednesday
And so on for every day of the week. If you want a different set of times for the weekend, you can change it… for example:
Time to Start: 22:00
Time to FInish: 07:00
Week Day Start: Friday
Week Day End: Saturday
Time to Start: 22:00
Time to FInish: 07:00
Week Day Start: Saturday
Week Day End: Sunday
and so on. Once you have your week setup click Submit at the bottom and then Apply Changes at the top.
Now we need to configure a Time Condition. This is what we will have FreePBX do the comparing with the Time Group we just setup. This is where the logic happens as this is where we point the destination of the inbound routes to.
ApplicationsTime ConditionsAdd Time ConditionNow we need to add our logic for the Time Condition to know how to route the call for us.
Set the following fields at a minimum:
Time Condition name: This is the name/description of the Time Condition. I suggest AutoDND since that is what we are using it for.Time Zone: Set this to your local time zone. For me it is America/New_YorkTime Group: Select the AutoDND group we created aboveDestination Matches: So this is the place where we send this call if the current time of the incoming call is within the Time Group. In other words, if the incoming call is within the time frame we set for the Time Groups, send the call here. For me I set Voicemail and then the Unavailable Message for my main phone extension.Destination non-matches: If the incoming call is outside the times we sent, send it here. For me I chose Extension and my main extension.When this is done, click Submit and then Apply Changes.
Last but not least, we need to set the Inbound Routes that we want to use this for.
ConnectivityInbound RoutesNow edit the Inbound Route you want to set this for.
Scroll down to Set Destination, click the drop down and select Time Conditions and then AutoDND (or whatever you called it).
Now click Submit and then Apply Changes.
Repeat this for each Inbound Route you want this to be used for.
And there you have it. Now when Aunt Sally tries to call at Midnight to tell you about Uncle Walt’s Gout flaring up, she will be sent to voicemail and you can sleep easy knowing you won’t be awakened.
Just some final thoughts:
Enjoy! Till next time!
]]>I have had a PBX at home for a while now for various uses and experimentation. Up till a few weeks ago, I was using FreePBX/Asterisk as the base for my PBX. But I wanted to try something new and I had heard about 3CX a while ago and I know that there are alot of people who are using it. I decided to explore this new system and just see what it had. I have been pleaseantly surprised with it’s capablities. However, diving into 3CX is a completely different topic. In this article, we will be looking at connecting 3CX to your AllStarLink System.
Keep in mind that 3CX only works using SIP as it is not an Asterisk based PBX system. Yet most connections to AllStar involve using an IAX based connection. If you remember from reading a previous article that I wrote about Setting Up AllStar for a SIP Connection, we walked through setting up AllStar to accept a connection from a SIP Client. Well, let’s use that same connection, but instead of using it for a client like Zoiper or Groundwire, we are going to use 3CX PBX to connect.
For this article we assume:
We are going to use the credentials that we setup on AllStar as the provider for a 3CX SIP Trunk.
SIP Trunks in the left hand column.Add SIP Trunk.Generic in the Select Country dropdown.Asterisk in the Select Provider in your Country dropdown.sip.conf file in AllStar in the Main Trunk No field. (In the example article, we used extension 2000.)
Ok. This should drop you into the edit screen for the trunk.Enter name for Trunk field (Suggested “Allstar Nodes”)Registrar/Server/Gateway Hostname or IP field, enter the IP Address of your Allstar System box. In the box at the end of that line, you will need to put the port in.
sip.conf file in Allstar.Authentication sectionType of Authentication drop down select Register/Account basedAuthentication ID (aka SIP User ID) field. (In the example article we used 2000, the same as the extension number).sip.conf file in the Authentication Password field.OK at the top to save the settings. Wait a minute or two for the trunk to register. It should register, unless you entered something wrong. If it does not register, go back and check all your settings.Once we have the Trunk setup and registered correctly, now all we need is an outbound route. Since we are just using the PBX as a jumping off point for the 3CX app on our phone or a Hard Phone on our desk, we do not need an inbound route. If you were going to setup an autopatch from AllStar, then you would need an inbound rule. But for this article, we are not doing that.
Outbound Rules on the left hand menu.Add.Rule Name (Suggested: “Allstar Outbound”)Calls to numbers starting with prefix give it a prefix for dialing. This would be a number that the PBX would see at the beginning of the dialed number that it would know to use this new route. I used 7 for mine. If you know of or remember the old “Dial 9 for an outside line” thing in offices, this is the same thing. This way you don’t accidently dial your Allstar Node if you are trying to make a different call.Make outbound calls on Section.Route 1 select the Allstar Trunk we configured above.Strip Digits dropdown, choose the number 1. This will strip off the prefix we defined above and then send the rest of the number dialed down the “trunk”.OK at the top to save your settings.Now we need to test our new trunk. Grab your Cellphone/Tablet that has the 3CX app already configured or grab your HardPhone and pick it up.
Dial one of your Allstar Nodes as prefix+node number. So using our example from above, you would dial “712345” and hit send.
If you have your node configured to anounce your connection, it should play the announcement and you are now on your node. Now you should be able to connect your node to other ASL nodes just like before.
Now any phone on your 3CX PBX can call your Allstar System and use the radio.
Note that you may want to restrict the Trunk to only extensions that you or another Licensed Ham in the house use in order to keep someone from accidently dialing your Allstar node. If you are the only one using it, then don’t worry.
And there you have it. You now have 3CX setup properly for using it with Allstar. Now just like the folks using FreePBX/Asterisk, you too can have one app to use to call your Allstar Nodes.
This gives you alot of flexibility when out and about and way from home. Since 3CX allows you to connect from outside the house, you can be connected all the time if needed.
]]>So this blog site is relativly new, as you well know, and when I put it together, I wanted a way to make it easier for me to make posts. In the past I have used Wordpress, but I have found that the industry is moving more towards using static sites vs. dynamic sites. Between ease of use/deployment and the inherrant security issues with a dynamic site, it makes sense. Not that Wordpress is by any means a bad CMS to use, I just didn’t want the headaches of hosting it here and constantly maintaining it to patch holes. So I wanted to try working with a static generator. I did some research and landed on Jekyll and Github Pages. That really peeked my interest because of:
Since I am using Github and have a CI/CD pipeline (Github Action) already setup to automagically deploy my blog site on a push to the website repo, I also wanted to setup a workflow that would post a Tweet to Twitter and a Toot to Mastodon at the same time. It would save me a few minutes each time when I made a new post to the blog. And…. you know…. geek factor.
So I thought I would share how I did it.
This method will work for any repo you have, but you may have to tweak the workflow for your specific use case.
In relation to the use of the workflow file I am going to share:
SECRETS to your Github Repoworkflow.yml file in Github ActionsIn order for this to work, you will need to obtain some API keys from Twitter and Mastodon.
For Twitter, you will need 4 Keys. A walkthrough on how to get them is here: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-started/getting-access-to-the-twitter-api
TWITTER_CONSUMER_API_KEY and TWITTER_CONSUMER_API_SECRET are the API Key and API Secret respectfully.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN and TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET are the access Token and Access Token Secret respectfully.For Mastodon, you just need the Application Access Token.
Development Section.New Applicationwrite:statuses scope in the check boxes belowYour Access Token one.You will then need to put all of these keys into seperate secrets in your Github repo. I would name them the same as in the YAML file so you can just copy and paste the YAML file, with minor tweaks of course.
Now we can create a new workflow YAML file for our pipeline. You should already be familiar with creating an Action workflow from scratch, so all you need to do is copy and paste the below YAML into a new one.
Here is the workflow YAML file I finally ended up with:
name: Send a Tweet
on:
push:
paths:
- '_posts/**'
env:
status: "NEW POST: ${{ github.event.commits[0].message }} https://n8acl.github.io"
jobs:
tweet:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: infraway/tweet-action@v1.0.1
with:
status: ${{ env.status }}
api_key: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_API_KEY }}
api_key_secret: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_API_SECRET }}
access_token: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
access_token_secret: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET }}
- name: fediverse-action
uses: rzr/fediverse-action@v0.0.6
with:
access-token: ${{ secrets.MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
host: "mastodon.radio"
message: ${{ env.status }}
So let’s break this YAML file down.
name: Send a Tweet
on:
push:
paths:
- '_posts/**'
env:
status: "NEW POST: $ https://n8acl.github.io"
First I give the job a name and then I only want it to run when there is a push to the _posts folder in the repo, basically when I add a new post file. That is what I am saying here. I am filtering the pushes on that folder. That way if I make an update to a static page like a contact page or an about page, I don’t want those commits posts to the Micro-Blogging Services.
We are also creating an environment Variable that holds our status message we want posted. This creates the message from the commit message and includes the site URL.
jobs:
tweet:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: send-twitter
uses: infraway/tweet-action@v1.0.1
with:
status: ${{ env.status }}
api_key: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_API_KEY }}
api_key_secret: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_API_SECRET }}
access_token: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
access_token_secret: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET }}
Here I am defining the job itself. This first step is where I am sending a message to Twitter that there is a new post.
We are using the environment variable that we created to now fill in the status message for Twitter.
- name: send-mastodon
uses: rzr/fediverse-action@v0.0.6
with:
access-token: ${{ secrets.MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
host: "mastodon.radio"
message: ${{ env.status }}
This last part does the same as the Twitter part, but just posts it to Mastodon. Make sure that you set the host: line to your Mastodon Instance. Otherwise it will default to Mastodon.social.
When I commit a new post to the repo, I need to make sure that I use a commit message that is the title of the post. So for this post for example I would use “Posting to Twitter-Mastodon with Github Actions - 06212022”. This would generate a status post of “NEW POST: Posting to Twitter-Mastodon with Github Actions - 06212022 https://n8acl.github.io” on Twitter and Mastodon.
Now my followers on those platforms will know when I have made a new post.
Keep in mind you will have to change your status to fit your use case.
And there you have it. Now when I make a new post, my Github Pipeline with send a tweet that there is a new post on the website and automatically deploy the actual post to my website.
This would work with any Repo you want to share about on Social Media even. You would just need to modify it to match your use case and what you want sent.
I am planning on using this on a number of my other repos as well to make deployment just a little less painful when I update other projects I am working on.
While I am not using these exactly how they are defined in these articles, these were my jumping off point on getting this all configured.
Tweeting New GitHub Pages Posts from GitHub Actions - Dave Brock: https://www.daveabrock.com/2020/04/19/posting-to-twitter-from-gh-actions/
fediverse-action repo: https://github.com/rzr/fediverse-action
Where do I begin….
There has been a lot of lies and a lot of accusations being thrown around about this issue that, while it does not effect all of us, it effects a few. And most of these lies and accusations are coming from one side. I wanted to take the time to set the record straight on a number of things about Ham’s Over IP.
Up to this point, I have been keeping my mouth shut and just ignorning what was going on, but I decided to break my silence and try to set things straight over what all happened.
So I suppose I should start from the beginning.
A few years ago, I found out about Hamshack Hotline, a VOIP phone service designed for Ham Radio Operators. I found the idea very interesting and a cool use of technology, so I signed up to join and I was with them for a number of years. At one point they incorporated and invited me to be on their Board of Directors and one of the system engineers as I did do some development for the service. I also made a number of friends on the service as well, people who I am still friends with today. So not everything in dealing with this was bad.
Some of the peer servers, as well as some of the application servers, were owned and operated as donations to the service to help them expand the service’s capabilites. These were paid for out of the owners pockets and maintenance was handled by them. At one point, when all of these issues began to arrise, these servers were asked to be transfered under a different HH cloud service account, but since these were paid for servers out of the member’s pocket, this request was denied. The owners even asked to just get the HH credit card number to just transfer payments to HH and they were ignored. They just wanted the servers under their control. We felt like something was not right.
Over time, others were brought in to help with handling tickets as there was an explosion of people wanting to use the service, which was great for them. A few of them were elevated to Director status, without the consultation of the rest of the Board. Ok. No big deal right.
One of these individuals eventually decided to go cowboy and felt like he was the only one who could do anyting in relation to handling tickets or making decisions for the organization. He would grab large batches of provisioning tickets from the ticketing system and then sit on them for days at a time and then work on them, pushing his completion metrics through the roof since no one else was able to work on these tickets.
Moving forward, he would also go back and reopen tickets that others had already completed to ask the user, again, for license verifications. Which was completely uncalled for and unnessesary step. The person who had originally worked the ticket had already done this verification in the past. But he felt the need to do it again, without being asked to do so. Again, this was not only an attempt to push his numbers up, but also a very disrepectful way of saying “This person did not do their job to my satisfaction and I am going to question their work.”
He would say that there were issues on the servers and needed help getting them straightened out. Admins and Enginneers would reach out to try to help him and troubleshoot the issues to duplicate them, only to be berated and yelled at by this individual about just taking guesses or just not knowing what they were doing, or why were we wasting his time. To the point that people washed their hands of helping him.
He took over work on the wiki and rewriting articles to make them his, instead of following proper procedures, and basically just pushed the person who was in charge of it out. That’s fine.
All of these and other concerns were, REPEATEDLY, brought to the attention of the founder and his right hand man that these issues were causing problems and needed to be dealt with. And these always fell on deaf ears.
At the beginning of the year, an administrative meeting for all the engineers and admins, was going to be called to have a meeting about the direction of the organization and plans for the upcoming year, like any organization should have. This meeting was never scheduled. The directors, engineers and other admin staff REPEATEDLY asked for the meeting to be scheduled so that issues could be dealt with. It never happened. Eventualy a post was made to the admins from the founder that the meeting topic was going to be talking about respecting each other and how this one individual was doing great work (as evidenced by his numbers) (remember he was artificially inflating his numbers?) and we needed a plan to help take the load off him and all pull our weight. The admins that have been having issues, blew up. None of that was true and if any repect was needed, it was from this one individual.
We hit March of this year. By this point a number of us were tired of being ignored and nothing being done to help fix the problem. After repeated attempts to have the issues dealt with and being ignored, things came to a head. A Ham Radio group requested a conference bridge on the system. They were summarily denied this bridge, even though they met all the requirements to obtain said bridge. This denial came from one individual. When questioned about it, he said they did not meet requirements and said no more. We repeatedly pointed out that, no the bridge should have been granted and even quoted his own wiki article about what the requirements were and still, radio silence. It got to the point that we would repeatedly reopen the ticket to have the bridge provisioned and he would just close it, as if his word was final. The other admins were constantly asking for answers and again, ignored.
The last week of March, 5 of the engineers and administrators logged into Discord and found we had lost all of our administrative priviledges on the server. No notice. No warning. No Nothing… just gone. And this happened over night as I didn’t log off till about 12:00 12:30 in the morning Eastern and I still had access at that point. We of course started questioning why the loss of privledges and started airing all of the problems in the lobby. We were then all pulled into a text channel, that was called “The Courtroom”. Whether that was meant to be funny or not, it was incredibly insulting. We were not the ones who needed to be on “Trial”. Yet in their own arrogance, they felt this was needed. It was at that point I threw my hands up and walked away. I was not being put “on trial” for something I didn’t do. So I blocked all of the problem people on Discord and left the server and walked away. I was over all the nonsense and power plays and just walked away.
Over the course of the next few days, the people who were left in charge of HH tried to justify why they had done what they had done, and eventually the other 4 people were banned from the Discord server. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, all the moderators were dismissed and banned. Anyone on HH that spoke out about the issue were banned. Anyone who even thought about the issue were banned. It became a police state.
Of the original 5 people who were banned, one of them was one of the people who fronted all the money for two of the peer servers, HHAP and HHUX. When we were all just removed, he took the servers with him. In their finite wisdom, HH just turned off the connection for HHAP, but never turned off the connection for HHUX. So all the scrambling they did for about a month trying to get the HHAP server backup was due to their own move in cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Eventually HH went through and marked all of the extensions of the people who were banned or left voluntarily for deletion and eventually deleted them all. That was alright by me as the day I left after finding out that I had lost Admin priviledges, I shut off my PBX that was handling my trunk and reloaded it. I was never going back and I never will. I also shut off all of the Discord bots I had developed and hosted here, on my own hardware, for them and deleted the applications on Discord so the bot would not work.
Taking those 2 servers, us and a number of other fine people who also either left HH right way or were banned, came together and have formed another VOIP network for Hams, Ham’s Over IP (HOIP). Many of the users of HH have voluntarily come over to the new service and have extensions over there. HOIP welcomes everyone and even with all the drama caused by HH, we still encourage people to use that service as well. There is no reason why people cannot use as many services as they want.
Some other things to point out that have been happening over the last couple of months:
Most of the issues that they are having right now are because of them. They refused to actually deal with the problems that were happening and instead just hoped it would go away. When it did not, they just made it go away. They are creating their own problems and they are trying to project these issues onto us. As stated previously, HOIP welcomes anyone who wants to use the HOIP service and encourage you to use the other services out there as well. There is no reason why we all can’t co-exist.
Recently, as a courtesy to existing users of HHUX since it still has a connection to the rest of the HH Network, an email was sent out talking about the issues that were going on and that in the near future, the connection would be severed and anyone who was using HH from that server would loose connection to HH. HH has made it clear that they do not want trunks or connections from other VOIP Phone systems to be able to access their service, so we are just complying with their wishes. The existing users are able to convert their extensions over to HOIP if they like. If not, they will loose connectivity and will need to get a new extension on HH. This was not done because we are trying to poach users or anything. We are not forcing people to stay on our service. They have the choice to stay or leave. Either way, we will accomodate them.
I will update this in the future as new issues arrise. For now, this is probably enough.
]]>There are any number of VOIP based radio linking networks out there, but for this article, Allstarlink is the one we are looking at. It is an internet based VOIP radio linking system that uses the Asterisk PBX as the backbone to link radios, repeaters and even phones to allow Ham’s to talk all around the world. Why is this important?
Because of it’s flexibility, Allstar is used at the heart of many multi-mode, bridge systems that allow any number of Ham Radio digital modes to talk to one another. We are able to bridge in DMR, D-Star, P25, Yeasu System Fusion, M-17 and even “Analog” Modes like Echolink, IRLP, Allstar and (since Asterisk is a PBX) we can even connect SIP based phone clients like Cisco IP phones and softphones like on the computer or our cellphone. So this really gives ALOT of flexibility to really be able to choose a mode and be able to talk with others.
There have been some other attempts in the past to connect other VOIP chat systems to Ham Radio as well. Some have used TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or Mumble, but these usually involve using an Audio mixer program like Virtual Audio Cables or Jack or something like that. However, I wanted a more elegant way to bridge a Discord audio channel to Allstar and then rest of the world. And I finally came up with a solution.
There is a project that I found that was designed to bridge Discord to a DMR Talkgroup called dmr-bridge-discord. This project connects to Discord via a bot and then uses Analog_Bridge and MMDVM_Bridge to connect to a DMR network and link to a DMR Talkgroup. The project is written in RUST.
I had been sitting around playing with some ideas and then one late Friday night, at about 1:30 in the morning, I had an epiphany! I was going about it all the hard way.
Digging into the project, you can see that dmr-bridge-discord uses USRP to connect to Analog_Bridge. Then I realized…. Allstar uses USRP to connect to Analog_Bridge. THAT’S IT!
So here is how I did it….
This is a long article, but I wanted to take you through all the steps for this process.
For this Project you will need:
Keep in mind, this assumes:
Also a Disclaimer: You modify your ASL setup at your own risk. If something goes sideways, it’s not my fault.
First you will need to setup a Discord Bot and a voice channel in order for the application to connect to Discord. In order to do this, do the following:
New Applicationbot selection under settingsAdd BotPublic BotMessage Intents Setting under Privileged Gateway Intents.OAuth2 and then URL Generatorbot and appplications.commandsNow we need to setup a private Allstar node in order for the application to send audio to and from Allstar.
If you have setup private nodes before (for DMR/D-Star/etc or for bridging in your phone) you can skip this step. If not, or if you need a review feel free to keep reading.
You will need to edit 3 files in /etc/asterisk on your Allstar server: extensions.conf, rpt.conf and modules.conf
Let’s start with extensions.conf since it is the easiest change to make. Open your extensions.conf file in your favorite editor or use nano:
sudo nano /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf
Look for the [radio-secure] stanza near the top. It will look something like this:
[radio-secure]
;exten => ${NODE},1,rpt,${NODE}
exten => 471940,1,rpt,471940
exten => 1896,1,rpt,1896
You will need to add a line here for your new private node. In this case, I used 1896 as my private node number. You can use any number from 1000 - 2000 for your private node number, but I started with 1899 (I have other private nodes) for mine since I read somewhere that since everyone is using the 1900 series of numbers, it can cause problems for Asterisk to connect. So we add a line like this:
exten => 1896,1,rpt,1896
Save that (if using nano CTRL + X + Y)
Next we need to edit the modules.conf file.
sudo nano /etc/asterisk/modules.conf
Look for the USRP Channel and make sure that is set to load. Change noload to load:
load => chan_usrp.so ; GNU Radio interface USRP Channel Driver
Save that (if using nano CTRL + X + Y)
Next we need to edit the rpt.conf file.
sudo nano /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf
Here we are going to add a bunch of stuff. First, scroll down through that file to the bottom of the stanza that has your last node configured. You are going to add the following underneath that:
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
[1896] ; Discord to ASL 403730
rxchannel = USRP/10.0.0.4:34002:32002 ; Use the USRP channel driver. Must be enabled in modules.conf
; 127.0.0.1 = IP of the target application
; 34001 = UDP port the target application is listening on
; 32001 = UDP port ASL is listening on
duplex = 0 ; 0 = Half duplex with no telemetry tones or hang time. Ah, but Allison STILL talks!
hangtime = 0 ; squelch tail hang time 0
althangtime = 0 ; longer squelch tail hang time 0
holdofftelem = 1 ; Hold off all telemetry when signal is present on receiver or from connected nodes
; except when an ID needs to be done and there is a signal coming from a connected node.
telemdefault = 0 ; 0 = telemetry output off. Don't send Allison to DMR !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Trust me.
telemdynamic = 0 ; 0 = disallow users to change the local telemetry setting with a COP command,
linktolink = no ; disables forcing physical half-duplex operation of main repeater while
; still keeping half-duplex semantics (optional)
nounkeyct = 1 ; Set to a 1 to eliminate courtesy tones and associated delays.
totime = 180000 ; transmit time-out time (in ms) (optional, default 3 minutes 180000 ms)
idrecording = |ie ; id recording or morse string see http://ohnosec.org/drupal/node/87
idtalkover = |ie ; Talkover ID (optional) default is none see http://ohnosec.org/drupal/node/129
startup_macro = *934
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Here we will need to edit the rxchannel to set the IP ADDRESS of where the dmr-bridge-discord application will be running. In this example, I have it running on another server on my Home Lab, so I have it pointing there. If you are going to run the bot locally, you will change that to 127.0.0.1. Leave the ports as they are if you like. You will need to remember these for the dmr-bridge-discord step.
Next you will need to add the node to be registered with asterisk. Scroll down that file and look for the [nodes] stanza. It should look like this:
[nodes]
; Note, if you are using automatic update for allstar link nodes,
; no allstar link nodes should be defined here. Only place a definition
; for your local nodes, and private (off of allstar link) nodes here.
471940 = radio@127.0.0.1:4568/471940,NONE ; This must be changed to your node number
; and iax port number if not the default
1896 = radio@127.0.0.1:4568/1896,NONE
You will need to add the line for the 1896 node we just added. Make sure that you use the correct port. In my example, I am using 4568 as my ASL port. Standard is 4569.
Finally, go to the node stanza of your main node that you want this to connect to and in the startmacro, set it so that this new private node will connect on startup.
Example:
startup_macro = *934*1896
Save that (if using nano CTRL + X + Y)
Once all these are edited and saved, you will need to restart your asterisk service.
sudo service asterisk restart
Once it comes back up, make sure that it comes up correctly and your new node is connected.
This will be the hardest part, but once this is done, you will be able to use this multiple times.
First go to the project repo and you will need to walk through the steps on the README of the project to build the application from source.
Once you have the release built, you will need to copy the .env file and the dmr-bridge-discord file to wherever you will be running this from.
Once you have them copied, you will need to edit the .env file. It will look like this:
# Analog Bridge configuration
TARGET_RX_ADDR="10.0.0.2:32002"
LOCAL_RX_ADDR="10.0.0.4:34002"
# Discord Bot configuration
BOT_TOKEN=<YOUR BOT TOKEN HERE>
BOT_PREFIX="!"
Where:
TARGET_RX_ADDR is the IP address of your ASL system (if running this on the ASL system it will be 127.0.0.1) and the second port number from the private node stanza we setup earlier.LOCAL_RX_ADDR is the IP Address of where this application is going to run (again if on the ASL system 127.0.0.1) and the first port number from the private stanza that we setup earlier.BOT_TOKEN is the bot token from where we setup the Discord Bot earlier.BOT_PREFIX is the prefix that will trigger the bot to respond to a command. You can leave this alone, unless you are planning on running a second bot in the same server, but that is up to you.Save the .env file.
To run the application and get audio flowing, in the directory where you have the files type :
./dmr-bridge-discord
Your bot should connect to ASL and Discord.
You may want this to run on boot up. There are numerous ways online that you can search for on how to make that happen.
The last part of the setup now is setting up a voice channel on your Discord Server. Add the channel with the following suggestions:
Now we need to test to make sure that everything is working. You will need a way to control Allstar outside of Discord (I have a way to control ASL from Discord commands, but I have not pushed it to github yet. Once I have all the kinks out, I will update this post.)
On Discord, connect to the voice channel you want the bot in. Then in a text channel (or in the voice text channel) type !join This will cause the bot to join the channel.
Connect your ASL node to another node and see if it has traffic. You should be able to hear the audio from the nodes in Discord. Audio should flow back as well.
A good one to use to test (if you have Echolink setup on your node) is the Echolink Test Server (from ASL 3009999). Since this will record and play audio back and forth, it’s a good way to test the bridge.
And there you have it. You now can talk on Allstar Via Discord.
Just some final thoughts:
Enjoy! Till next time!
]]>In my last post, I talked about how to setup Allstar to connect to Discord. In this one, I am going to talk about setting up a SIP client to connect to Allstar.
But why would you want to do this? There are alot of softphone clients out there, as well as a bunch of old liquidated IP Hard Phones that use the Session Inititation Protocol, or SIP, to connect to a PBX. IAX is used to connect Asterisk Peers together, but in many applications, it has been used as a way to connect a client. There are some flaws and got-ya’s to that, but SIP is a much better, cleaner protocol to use for carrying Audio over a call.
Remember that under the hood, Allstar is really just an Asterisk PBX, so connecting a phone to it is trivial.
In talking about connecting Discord to Allstar, some one asked me about how to setup a SIP client to connect, so hang on to your hats, cause here we go.
For this article we assume:
First we need to setup our Allstar system to accept a SIP connection.
You will need to edit 2 files in /etc/asterisk on your Allstar server: sip.conf and modules.conf
First we need to edit the modules.conf file.
sudo nano /etc/asterisk/modules.conf
Look for the SIP Channel and make sure that is set to load. Change noload to load:
load => chan_sip.so ; Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
Save that (if using nano CTRL + X + Y)
Next we need to edit the sip.conf file.
sudo nano /etc/asterisk/sip.conf
You will need to do the following:
bindaddr field to 0.0.0.0 (so it doesn’t bind to specific address)bindport to something else. You could use 5061. Remember this for later.Then add a stanza similiar to this:
[2000]
type=friend
host=dynamic
username=2000
secret=<your secret password> ; make it yours
dtmfmode=rfc2833
mailbox=2000 ; Mailbox for message waiting indicator
context=myphone ; Points to the stanza in extensions.conf
callerid="<Your callsign>"
2000 is just the extension number I gave it.. It can be anything you want, but remember that this will be the username for your login and it must be a number. We put that in the stanza header and then also in username and mailbox.
Make sure to set a password you will remember. you will need this later.
Callerid can be anything you want (blank even) since no one will ever see it.
Context is the context stanza you have setup for your Allstar Nodes in the extensions.conf file. When I initially setup my Allstar Node Extensions I called it [myphone] for lack of anything better at the time. So whatever your stanza title is, is what you will use.
Save that (if using nano CTRL + X + Y)
Once all these are edited and saved, you will need to restart your asterisk service.
sudo service asterisk restart
Once it comes back up, make sure that it comes up correctly.
Unless you are like me and don’t like to punch threw unessesary ports on your router firewall and connect to all you services at home via a VPN (told you I was a geek), you will need to forward the SIP port in your router to the IP address of your Allstar System. You will need to forward it as UDP. This port number will be the same one you just setup in the sip.conf file.
Each router is different on how to do this, so you will need to look that up.
If you are only going to connect within your network, you will not need to do this step.
Now you will need to setup your phone.
Each phone is a little different. But for the most part when you setup your account, you will need to setup a SIP connection and the following:
username - This is the username that you set up in your sip.conf filepassword - Same thingdomain - This will be your public IP Address or Dynamic DNS URL that you setup. You will also need the port number.
my.coolurl.com:5061Once you have that all setup it should connect.
If you are using the phone internally, you would point it at the IP address of your Allstar system instead.
If you are using the Groundwire client, you could use this walkthrough as a starting place. Just make sure to use the right username, password and domain for your Allstar System.
To use this connection, once it connects, all you have to do is dial the node number of your Allstar node and hit send. It should Connect, play an announcement if one is setup, and now you can control it just like if you were on a radio. *3+node number to connect to a node, *1+node Number to disconnct, etc.
To Transmit, you would dial *99 to talk and # to stop. That is your PTT.
Unfortunatly there are alot of different types of Hard and Softphones out there, so covering all of them would never happen in this article. This is just a way to show you how to setup your Allstar Node to accept SIP connections. This would help to eliminate the need to have multiple nodes, cellular modems and all sorts of other things.
This is just one of many ways that we can connect Ham Radio and Computers together. Part of why I do what I do :)
Enjoy! Till next we meet!
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