Free Home Phone with Raspberry Pi

With a Raspberry Pi, and Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), any old telephone, and a Google Voice number, you can setup your own personal telephone exchange and get free home phone service.

The configuration steps involve a handful of simple terminal commands to setup the Raspberry Pi, and then a few web browser pages to configure the telephone extensions and connect your Google Voice number.

1. Setup a Raspberry Pi with Asterisk and FreePBX

Asterisk PBX is an open source telephone Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and VOIP server that runs on the Linux operating system.

FreePBX is a web based configuration program for Asterisk. It allows you to configure all of the settings of the Asterisk server through a web browser interface, similar to how you might configure your home router.

The easiest way to get Asterisk and FreePBX on the Raspberry Pi is to start with the raspbx disk image available from raspberry-asterisk.org

Download latest raspbx disk image from raspberry-asterisk.org/downloads/

Create a SD card with the raspbx image and power up your Raspberry Pi. Follow the few simple instructions on the downloads page to complete the initial configuration steps for your new operating system installation. You are now ready to begin setting up your telephone server.

2. Plug In your Phone

You will need an IP compatible phone to connect to the Asterisk server. One option is to get an IP phone from an office supply retailer for about $150. We use the Digium D40 IP phone as one of the extensions on our Asterisk server.

Another option is to get an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). With an ATA, you can turn any regular telephone into an IP phone extension. We use a Cisco 2 Line ATA , similar to this one, which you can purchase for around $35.

Connect an ethernet cable to the blue port on the back of the ATA adapter. Connect your telephone to the phone line port on the back of the ATA. Power up the device before you begin configuring the Asterisk server to add this device as an extension.

3. Setup your Telephone Server

Configuring the Asterisk telephone server using the FreePBX web application and connecting your phone extension will take you about 20 minutes. There are detailed instructions in our tutorial here:

4. Setup Google Voice on Asterisk using FreePbx

Once your Asterisk server is up and running, you can connect it to your Google Voice account and make calls to phone numbers on the plain old telephone system . This step will takes about 15 minutes. All of the steps can be accomplished using a web browser.

You should now be ready to make and receive telephone calls with your Google Voice number on your home phone extension.

Note: You can still make and receive calls with your number from the Google Hangouts app on your smartphone. When someone calls your your Google voice number, both your home extension and the Hangouts app will start ringing, and you can answer the call from either one.