VoicemailBox

VoicemailBox is an application for reading voice messages left on a fixed telephone line.

Its graphical interface is based on the Kivy framework.

Created to run on a Raspberry Pi with a touch screen, it should work on any GNU/Linux system.

Purpose

In France, some operators offer, as an option, to send voice messages left on a fixed line to a given email address.

VoicemailBox retrieves the voicemail messages thus sent, signals their arrival and offers a graphical interface to read them.

For now, it is designed to work with the French operator Bouygues Telecom.

Installation - General case

VoicemailBox can be installed with pip :

pip install voicemailbox

Installation - Raspberry Pi

The app has been tested on a Raspberry Pi 3, running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Buster release), and the following hardware :

• official Raspberry Pi touchscreen ;
• OneNiceDesign touchscreen case ;
• adafruit speaker bonnet ;
• adafruit stereo enclosed speaker set.

On this system, some packages have to be installed first (Source) :

apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev \ 
libsdl2-ttf-dev pkg-config libgl1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev \
python3-setuptools python3-dev libmtdev-dev \ 
xclip xsel libjpeg-dev ffmpeg

Then, Kivy and VoicemailBox can be installed (virtual environment recommended) :

pip install --upgrade pip setuptools Cython
pip install kivy[base,media] --no-binary kivy
pip install voicemailbox

To allow rpi-backlight to manage touchscreen backlight without root access, a udev rule has to be created :

$ echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="backlight",RUN+="/bin/chmod 666 /sys/class/backlight/%k/brightness /sys/class/backlight/%k/bl_power"' | sudo tee -a /etc/udev/rules.d/backlight-permissions.rules

Additionnal configuration

The following instructions enable VoicemailBox to be integrated with the hardware described above :

• edit /boot/config.txt :

  • touchscreen rotation : add lcd_rotate=2
  • GPU's memory set to 256 Mb : add gpu_mem=256
  • adafruit speaker bonnet :
    • add dtoverlay=hifiberry-dac
    • add dtoverlay=i2s-mmap
    • comment dtparam=audio=on

• for speaker bonnet support, create /etc/asound.conf with the following content :

   pcm.speakerbonnet {
      type hw card 0
   }
  
   pcm.dmixer {
      type dmix
      ipc_key 1024
      ipc_perm 0666
      slave {
        pcm "speakerbonnet"
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 8192
        rate 44100
        channels 2
      }
   }
  
   ctl.dmixer {
       type hw card 0
   }
  
   pcm.softvol {
       type softvol
       slave.pcm "dmixer"
       control.name "PCM"
       control.card 0
   }
  
   ctl.softvol {
       type hw card 0
   }
  
   pcm.!default {
       type             plug
       slave.pcm       "softvol"
   }	   
  

• Wi-Fi : create wpa_supplicant.conf file in /boot with following content (Source) :

   ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
   update_config=1
   country=<Insert 2 letter ISO 3166-1 country code here>
   
   network={
    ssid="<Name of your wireless LAN>"
    psk="<Password for your wireless LAN>"
   }
  

• to use kivy with Raspberry Pi touchscreen, modify ~/.kivy/config.ini, add under [input] section :

   mouse = mouse
   mtdev_%(name)s = probesysfs,provider=mtdev
   hid_%(name)s = probesysfs,provider=hidinput
  

• create systemd service to run at startup :

  • create /etc/systemd/system/voicemailbox.service with the follonwing content :

     [Unit]
     Description=voicemailbox
     After=multi-user.target
     
     [Service]
     Type=idle
     Environment=KIVY_AUDIO=ffpyplayer
     ExecStart=/home/pi/.venv/bin/python -m voicemailbox
     WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/
     User=pi
     
     [Install]
     WantedBy=multi-user.target
    

  • run at start-up :

    sudo systemctl enable voicemailbox
    

• use Log2Ram :

  • install :

     echo "deb http://packages.azlux.fr/debian/ buster main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azlux.list
     wget -qO - https://azlux.fr/repo.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
     apt update
     apt install log2ram
    

  • modify frequency : run systemctl edit log2ram-daily.timer and add :

     [Timer]
     OnCalendar=weekly
    

Usage

Some environment variables have to be defined before running the application :

VOICEMAILBOX_IMAP_SERVER # IMAP server address
VOICEMAILBOX_EMAIL_ADDRESS # User email address
VOICEMAILBOX_EMAIL_PASSWORD # User password

Then VoicemailBox can be launched :

python -m voicemailbox

Third party libraries and dependencies

VoicemailBox makes use of the following third party projects :

• Kivy (MIT license) ;
• IMAPClient (New BSD license) ;
• rpi_backlight (MIT license) ;
• python_dotenv (BSD license) ;
• PYYaml (MIT license).

VoicemailBox also includes :

• the FontAwesome icons (SIL Open Font License) ;
• the ring song from LaSonotheque.org (Free license).

License

VoicemailBox is placed under CeCILL license (version 2.1).