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=
  
  network={
   ssid=""
   psk=""
  }
  

• 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).