Can Asterisk help me?

I already posted this same question in a different forum, however it was suggested I reach out to the experts here for some help. I am going to copy and paste my earlier post, so I hope that doesnt bother anyone! I saw a very interesting Linux pc earlier yesterday, and I want to know if I Asterisk is a good fit. To begin, the device can be located at the following link:

betanews.com/article/Marvell … 1235572776

I would want to get a very cheap/free (most likely SIP) DID number that I could give out to people. They would call that number, and then the system (this little wall-wart) would prompt them for their name, and then forward the call out to me (perhaps call blast to a few numbers) and announce the name to me using another SIP account for outbound calls. I could then decide to answer the call, or send it to voicemail from whatever phone I take the call on. Right now there are a few hosted services that do this, in fact I use Grandcentral for this very purpose. GC is free, and there is a similar paid offering called Ring Central. The only reason I dont stick with GC is that the latency is terrible, and it feels like you are on a half duplex 1980’s international call or something. I figure why pay for a (potentially crappy) hosted offering if I can do it on my own $80 ‘pc’. Can I do something like this using this device? All thoughts/ideas are appreciated!

You need to be able to install the linux kernel headers on it. ALso I am not sure about the room on it. For a basic asterisk box based on the specs it looks like it will work.

Should be ok for a small number of concurrent calls.

Cheers.

Marco Bruni
www.marcobruni.net

Looks powerful enough for a home or small office system, but it is not Intel Architecture, so some research would need to be done to determine whether it can provide internal timing.

I have heard that if I install OpenWRT on it then it should be easier to get Asterisk running on it. What are your thoughts on that?

Yes it should be, because there are Asterisk ipkg packages built for Openwrt but before you’ve to get Openwrt run on your platform, is your platform supported by Openwrt ?

Cheers.

Marco Bruni
www.marcobruni.net

I had a further look at this, and it seems to me that it is intended for mass production, not one off systems. In particular, I would be very wary of changing the kernel, as, if you get it wrong, you may need special tools to reload the flash memory.