This project is the sourceforge continuation of work that was started by David M. Stanhope. His web site is fobbit.[com,net,org]. Our goal here is to broaden the base of both developers and users through the services offered at Sourceforge.

Fobbit is software to allow the use of the Creative Labs VOIP Blaster hardware device with NetBSD, Linux, and Microsoft Windows without using the the original Creative Labs software.

It works behind a NAT/firewall, and is open source.

The following is taken from the original fobbit.com website:

This software does not inter-operate with the Windows software that comes with the device. Also please be advised that this software is probably worth exactly what you paid for it (nothing!), so if it destroys you computer I can't be held responsible. It is mainly a learning exercise for me, so use it at your own risk.

The VOIP Blaster is a very useful device at a very attractive cost. It allows you to make voip calls using a standard telephone in much the same way you make normal wireline calls. The software that comes with it has one very big limitation, it will not work behind a firewall, NAT, or other internet-connection share scheme. It also requires that you sign up with a credit-card for their service. In order to overcome these limitations I have written software to use it under NetBSD, Linux, and Windows. Since FreeBSD (?and OpenBSD?) use the same usb subsystem, should be relatively easy to use with these also.

The application is not very elegant but it gets the job done. It uses TCP for signaling and UDP for the voice traffic. It can be configured to use TCP for both types of traffic since this plays better with firewalls, NAT, and other internet connection-sharing schemes. To use this software behind these devices, some configuration of them is required. A phonebook server is used to allow endpoints to connect to each other even when they use dynamic ip. The serial-number embedded in each voip-blaster becomes its phone-number.

With this software, most of the work is done at the user level, the drivers only provide access to the usb-pipes implemented in the hardware. The Windows and Linux versions come with a custom driver for the device. The NetBSD version uses the standard 'ugen' driver, it requires a small modification since it doesn't correctly support 'interrupt' pipes which the VOIP blaster requires. A simple patch (less than 10 lines, see main.c for details) makes these drivers handle the 'interrupt' pipes as 'bulk' pipes. Main problem I still have (under NetBSD) is that the application starts very slowly, say 30 to 45 seconds for the ugen pipe opens to complete, after which everything works fine. This may be due to the 'interrupt' versus 'bulk' pipe issue, but not sure at this time. Another issue is that the device seems to only support the G.723.1 codec, and there are no freely available sources for one. This makes it very hard to build a compatible application for other audio devices such as sound cards. Current software will definitely require some programming/system knowledge to use. I place no restrictions on this source-code, please feel free to use it in anyway you want. Feel free to email me with any questions or comments, I'll try to help if I can.