tutorial

You've probably heard of Asterisk before. It's one of those buzzed-about open source projects that keeps popping up on O'Reilly and Slashdot. Take our word for it: it's fun stuff. At EchoDitto we run our office phone system on it, have built client applications around it, and even made a version of Tetris for our lobby monitors that runs on it (more on that later).

But getting into Asterisk can seem more intimidating than it really is. There's plenty of documentation around, but a lot of it seems to assume that the reader has just come home from his or her job managing AT&T's fiberoptic backbone and is now hoping to screw around with some open-source fun. In other words, it's written for an audience of VoIP engineers.

Well, none of us are VoIP engineers. If you're like us, you're a general technologist who builds stuff on the web, knows that in five years your toaster will have Ruby bindings, and realizes that There Is No Spoon. You've used Skype and heard of Vonage, but you don't know much about VoIP besides that. And now you'd like to use Asterisk to recreate the final scene in The Lawnmower Man (the director's cut) — or maybe just have your website talk to people over the phone.

We can do that! In fact, it's probably easier than you think. In this post I'll outline how to get up and running with Asterisk, how to connect it to the Plain Ol' Telephone System (POTS) and how to connect it to your programs. From there it's up to you.