New to CA, and sharing my setup experience!

[joseph85750]

First, wanted to thank those responsible. This is an excellent application.

For a while I've been looking for a way to simply block calls. There were devices out there, but they were flawed in that they had no regex for blocking. The best I could find were devices which could block at the prefix level. Sub-optimal.
Basically, I was looking for a way to simply block/drop calls originating from any 8xx area code, and a handful of other area codes. This seems to do the job!
I wasn't interested in the voice mail component, since I already have an answering machine.

I'm hoping my research will be of some help to others.

First, I got a U.S. Robotics 5637 Modem from an Ebay merchant for $39. Didn't want to spend $150 on Amazon.
I hooked it up, tested a bit, but was getting errors with some of the tests which I learned were due to outdated firmware. So, I downloaded:

https://support.usr.com/support/5637/5637-files/USRFlash_1.2.23.zip

However, the flash installer isn't for ARM, so I connected the modem to a Linux laptop and flashed it with the Linux x86 flash utility included in the zip file:

./mdmflash -g /dev/ttyACM0 -f svn1223.hex

I still got an error with one of the tests:
AT+V=1

But, had no error with:
AT+FCLASS=0

I decided to push on. Turns out the modem was now working properly with callattendant.

To install, I needed to do the following:

pip3 install callattendant --break-system-packages

The above sounds worse than it is, but it did allow the installation to proceed. Otherwise, I was getting errors. Sorry, I didn't record the errors.

To accomplish my goal of having it simply block numbers and pass everything else without voicemail, I modified some entries in the app.cfg

BLOCK_NUMBER_PATTERNS = {"^623": "623 Area Code", "^8": "8xx Number", "^447": "447 Area Code", "^757": "757 Area Code", "^771": "771 Area Code"}
 
BLOCKED_ACTIONS = ("greeting", )
SCREENED_RINGS_BEFORE_ANSWER = 99
PERMITTED_RINGS_BEFORE_ANSWER = 99

And created my own blocked call "greeting" message entry:

BLOCKED_GREETING_FILE = "resources/blocked.wav"
BLOCKED_RINGS_BEFORE_ANSWER = 0

My answering machine picks up after 3 rings, so 99 was a safe value to avoid the voice mail capabilities of callattendant. And zero for the BLOCKED_RINGS was good so it would pick pick up and block quickly before my answering machine picked up.

The thing I spent the most time on was creating a blocked.wav message that worked. Initially, my messages sounded like listening to a 4800 baud modem, or totally crashed my Raspberry Pi! (quite impressive actually)

I learned the wav file needed to be 8bit, 8000hz. I tried creating, converting several audio files to that format, but they sounded like crap. I finally found a solution. I found this website: https://www.narakeet.com/app/text-to-audio/
It lets you create text-to-voice wav files, with countless selections of male and female voices, and download the wav file. Once downloaded, it needed to be converted to 8bit 8000hz

Downloaded file, and converted it with ffmpeg:

RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 48000 H

$ ffmpeg -i downloaded.wav -ar 8000 -ac 1 -acodec pcm_u8 blocked.wav

$ file blocked.wav
blocked.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 8 bit, mono 8000 Hz

Although it reduced the quality a bit, it was quite acceptable.

That's about it.
I hope this helps others!

[thess]

Thanks for the good writeup and kind words. Just to note a couple of things you mentioned...

To install, I needed to do the following:

pip3 install callattendant --break-system-packages

Installing Callattendant from PyPi is not only unsupported by this fork of the project, it will install an VERY old version which is not compatible.

I still got an error with one of the tests:
AT+V=1

This is not a valid command for either USR or Conexant V.90 modems.

[joseph85750]

Thanks for the reply.
I had no idea this project even existed until I simply started searching Google for "Block calls raspberry pi", etc. Which sent me to:

https://emxsys.github.io/callattendant/

So, I followed instructions there for setting it up. I was amazed how easy it was, and pretty much only needed to do that pip3 install.

As far as the AT+V=1 command, that was mentioned in a troubleshooting thread:

https://groups.io/g/callattendant/topic/83183318#msg238

I'd be up for trying again, or upgrading to a newer/proper version though.

[thess]

Original author, Bruce (emxsys) Schubert passed >4yrs ago and his repo and PyPi releases are locked to his abandoned account.

Installation options are described here, in the README and in the Wiki.
Current version is 2.0.7