I have been working on a special program for the phone system we have at our apartment. It is an Inter-Tel phone system that is normally found in large office buildings. We, err, well... Zach decided it would be a good idea to get one along with a billion phone lines. At first I thought it was kind of unnecessary, but now I don't know how I ever lived without one.

Anyway, anytime someone makes a call it spits out the information from the serial port. I have written a Visual Basic program that logs this in a MySQL database. I have tied in the information with a couple of existing databases and now I can track all sorts of information.

For example, when you call my apartment and leave a message, the phone system sends your phone number, what line you called, what time you called, and how long you were on the phone to my program (SMDR Reporting). That gets logged in the database. The program then takes your phone number and looks it up online. We now have your name and address. Then with that, I use your zip code to find your latitude and longitude. I use that information to print a report at the end of the day that lists who called, when, a map with 'lil dots saying where people called from (how cute, right?), along with a couple of graphs such as system usage by hour, trunk usage, and extension usage. Then it also prints off the estimated bill for that day along with what we saves vs other phone companies.

It's really kind of neat. Inter-Tel would charge thousands of dollars for something like this and I did it all in my free time. This whole thing will become a piece of a larger project that I am just starting that I will tell you all about later.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2003 at 12:00 pm and is filed under From Old Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.