Head of School's Welcome UQ
Centre Floorplan Programme Location Sponsors Student Project List Prizes 2001
Photo Gallery Contact
Details
ITEE Innovation Expo
2002 ITEE Innovation Expo
2001
| Home » Student Projects » Paul Winning |
Bluetooth Chatphone
Student: Paul Winning
Supervisor: Neil Bergmann
Category: Engineering Thesis Project - Computer Systems
The Bluetooth Chatphone makes possible wireless voice communications between a cordless phone handset and a standard PC. The purpose is to make internet voice-conferencing as simple and comfortable as using a normal cordless telephone. Additionally, services such as e-mail notification make the handset useful for more than just voice-conferencing. It is effectively a wireless voice and serial interface to the PC. The Bluetooth Chatphone is a joint project. This abstract encompasses the software aspects.
The Chatphone handset establishes a full duplex 64kbps PCM voice connection (phone quality) with the ‘microphone-in’ and ‘speaker-out’ ports of the PC’s soundcard. A wireless serial link between the handset and RS232 port of the PC is established for control signals. Control signals are used to notify the PC of events on the Chatphone, such as a button being pressed. The PC can send a response, for example, that makes the Chatphone ring.
Open source software for Linux is used to implement complete functionality of the Chatphone. The Chatphone was fully integrated with Gnomemeeting, an internet voice-conferencing package. To achieve this, modifications to Gnomemeeting were made. These modifications enabled Gnomemeeting to make the Chatphone ring upon arrival of an incoming call. Onboard software allows the user to accept the Gnomemeeting call by simply pressing a button on the Chatphone. Calls can also be initiated using either buttons or voice-commands. Voice-commands are implemented using cvoicecontrol, a speaker-dependant voice activation program. Perl script that incorporates a 'text to speech' program called Festival was created. The script enables the Chatphone to ring when an e-mail is received, and allows the user to hear the text of the e-mail using Festival.
All major aspects of the software have been tested except for the effectiveness of voice recognition over the wireless link. This will be done by October 2002.