How can I generate voice phone calls from a LabView RT application (PCI Board)?

[Daniel Faria]

Hi.

I'm working on the development of a safety system for a research facility. The application requires that voice phone calls to specific places (like the police department) must be generated automatically by the system in case of undesirable states. The system must also get some kind of acknowledgment from the other side of the line (like a specific button press).

Is that possible to be developed with LabView RT running on a PCI Plug-In Board? If so, how can I do it? Is there a module (or a VI) that implements that functionality?

Thanks for the help.

Daniel

[Ricardo_SR]

Hello,

It is not very clear what you want to do, because it seems that you want to automate a phone system. The RT boards are used for Data Acquisition basically. If you have a Real Time system, is because you want to have something that will be performing tasks deterministically.
Now, how are you planning to use the DAQ board for automating those calls? Do you have an external modem that will be used to do the calls? or, what are you planning to do?
Please let me know.

Thank you

Ricardo S.
National Instruments

[Daniel Faria]

Hi, Ricardo.

I'll be using the RT PCI board to constantly monitor the state of a chemical testing facility (including gases leakages and flows, power supplies, and interlocks) and taking some fast responses (in a maximum period of time) if a dangerous state is detected. That’s the reason we need to use a RT system.

One of the possible (and very important) responses of the system will be the generation of voice phone calls for the police department. But as the safety of the place is an essential issue, it’s not enough to send a .WAV file through the phone line (as I’ve seen some people talking about on this forum). The system must synthesize the voice message (since it’ll have millions of different messages), send it by phone, and receive some acknowledgment from the person of the other side of the line, like a specific button press.

I’m planning to use a PCI modem plugged on the same computer to be able to make the phone calls. What I don’t know is how (if it’s possible) the RT LabView application would do this. Is there a way it could communicate directly with the modem and send the messages? Or is it possible for LabView to communicate (sending the written message) with a Windows software that would do this synthesize and phone call job?

If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Thank you,

Daniel

[Ricardo_SR]

Hello Daniel,

There are two problems I see here. The first one is that if you have a PCI modem, since that is not an NI hardware, you will have to create a driver for RT for that hardware. Other solution is to use a serial board and then talk to an external modem through serial.
Now the second problem that I see here is that you are talking about sending a text message to a Windows application. You must remember that the RT side of the DAQ board is mainly for data acquisition. You would need to have RT on the computer where you will have the PCI board, because the PCI RT will not know that there is a modem next to it and it will not have the drivers for it. And even if it had them, the modem would have to be a daughter board for this PCI RT board.
That is why it would be better to have RT in the computer, not in a DAQ board. And once in the computer, you can work with the serial, TCP or whatever you might need.
Now, once you get the messages, definitely there should be many ways to work with the data before transmitting or receiving, but first we need to define the architecture.


Ricardo S.
National Instruments.