T
The Bear
Does anyone know how to get the Caller ID from a phone and make use of it in
a computer?
T.B.
a computer?
T.B.
L
Liam McNamara
T.B.,
Are you talking about a physical phone (hard phone) or a soft[ware] phone?
If it's the former it will depend on what type of phone you have.
For ISDN phones you will need a data port on the phone, usually a serial
port (DB-9 or DB-25), and if a TSP (TAPI Service Provider) is not available
you will have to write one and communicate with the phone, usually with AT
commands. Or you could bypass TAPI and just use the AT commands.
For IP phones you will be able to connect to the phone using your network,
but again you will have to know the API to communicate with it. For example
Avaya uses a protocol called CMAPI, but you will need a server, licenses
etc.
Basically, it's not trivial and depending on what type of phone and what
software you have for it, it could involve quite a lot of work.
--Liam.
Are you talking about a physical phone (hard phone) or a soft[ware] phone?
If it's the former it will depend on what type of phone you have.
For ISDN phones you will need a data port on the phone, usually a serial
port (DB-9 or DB-25), and if a TSP (TAPI Service Provider) is not available
you will have to write one and communicate with the phone, usually with AT
commands. Or you could bypass TAPI and just use the AT commands.
For IP phones you will be able to connect to the phone using your network,
but again you will have to know the API to communicate with it. For example
Avaya uses a protocol called CMAPI, but you will need a server, licenses
etc.
Basically, it's not trivial and depending on what type of phone and what
software you have for it, it could involve quite a lot of work.
--Liam.
T
The Bear
It's a physical phone with call display, the type you'd get from a Phone
Store.
Store.
L
Liam McNamara
T.B.
If the phone does not have a port on the back that you can connect using a
cable to your PC there is no easy way of getting the caller id. Unless of
course you're pretty handy with a soldering iron and hacking circuits!
--Liam.
If the phone does not have a port on the back that you can connect using a
cable to your PC there is no easy way of getting the caller id. Unless of
course you're pretty handy with a soldering iron and hacking circuits!
--Liam.
T
The Bear
Even if the phone itself doesn't have an additional port on the back of the
computer, it can still be connected to the computer through a splitter. With
that being said... assuming all the hardware is in place... How difficult
does it become to get caller id?
T.B.
computer, it can still be connected to the computer through a splitter. With
that being said... assuming all the hardware is in place... How difficult
does it become to get caller id?
T.B.
R
Ryan LaNeve
The Bear said:
Not terribly difficult, especially if you've done any serial programming.
Assuming you plug the phone line into your PC's modem, and your modem is
recognized as, say, COM2 to the PC, you would just write code to open the
COM port, send the appropriate AT command for your particular modem to tell
it you're interested in caller ID info (it was AT#CID=1 for my modem when I
did this four or five years ago) and then listen for data coming into your
serial connection. The data you receive will be a simple string containing
exactly what you'd see on a caller ID box or phone - the number, name if
available, date/time stamp, etc...
There's no serial support in .NET 1.x, though, so to start you'll need to
find/write some code for that. There are several .NET serial libraries
available online, both open- and closed-source, so just Google for that.
Next, you'll want to figure out exactly what make/model modem you have and
go to the manufacturers website to find documentation about the AT commands
it accepts, looking for the one to enable caller ID info. Beyond that, it's
shouldn't be more than a dozen lines of code to open the port (assuming
you're not writing your own serial port code), send the AT command and wait
for the data to come in.
Good luck,
Ryan LaNeve