Disruptive Telephony

Here's something for a Friday afternoon... yes, indeed, out at Emerging Telephony 2007 back in February, someone (David Troy) did indeed have Asterisk running on a Roomba.  And yes, it was "Press one to start sucking. Press two to stop sucking."

Pictures are now available on Flickr.

More precisely, Asterisk is running on a hacked Linksys WRT54G access point (which is Linux-based) and the controller is using a Nokia WiFi/GSM phone to connect to the Asterisk install.  You could also control the direction of the Roomba using the other keys on the phone keypad.

Why would anyone do this?  Well... why not?

As I mentioned in a recent post, the beautiful thing about VoIP is that it now enables people to "play" with telephony... and do wacky things like hook it up to a Roomba!  :-)

Enjoy the weekend!  Perhaps next week I'll actually get some time to upload the rest of the pictures I took out at ETel. (Hey, it was only 6 weeks ago... )