?How? Help me create a simple unattended autodialer.

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peterdwalker

Registered
I am a caregiver for disabled adults and need our iMac ( CoreDuo; OSX 10.4.8 ) to automatically dial a phone number at specific times every day and enter a numeric code. For example: on Sunday at 2pm and 6pm dial "1-800-555-1234", pause for 8 seconds, dial "123456", pause for 4 seconds, hang up. The time to dial will change depending what day of the week it is. The iMac has a new Apple External 56K ( v.92 ) USB Modem ( Model# MA034 ). I've searched the internet extensively and have found discussions on "cron", but my programming ability is minimal. Please help.
 
While I can't help you script that, sadly, I'm interested in what this would do. Do the disabled adults pick up the phone and hear the Mac type "123456"? And does that in any way help them?
 
Well - all you'd need to do is send the modem a few Hayes commands to make it dial.

While I haven't done it - the following information should help:

ATDT18005551234,,,,,,,,123456
then wait 4 seconds and issue
ATH

You could put it into a cron statement, and then just do a
echo ATH > /dev/tty.modem

Which echos those commands to the modem device.

There are really a number of ways you can do it. If your programming skills are up, you can actually open the device and write the commands.

Afterthought: You can test this out by lifting the handset and doing the echo command - verify that it works.
 
Yesurbius - I think you're pointing me towards a workable solution. I had to use /dev/tty.usbmodem which I found. It is a usb connected ext modem and also /dev/tty.modem doesn't exist on our iMac. I've only tried "echo ATDT18005551234 > /dev/tty.usbmodem" from a terminal window, but no evidence that it's dialing. I guess I can put a working command into a cron and then the rest....when I get there?.?.... Remember, my goal is for this to work UNATTENDED...

Simbalala - I did download "Jon's phone Tool" which I believe is similar to ABDialer, but I couldn't get it to work....???...

???Any more ideas???
 
You can hook a handset up to the same line as your modem so you can 'hear' the modem dialing. That'd be the test. I'm not sure if iMac has a modem speaker feed - if it does you can turn the speaker on with full volume by using the M3 command:

echo ATM3DT18005551234 > /dev/tty.usbmodem

These commands just mean AT=Attention, Turn speaker on, volume max, dial with tone dialing this number ...

That way you could hear, and wouldn't need the phone handset.

I looked into ABDialer for you ... You could do an AppleScript with ABDialer - but their scripting functionality is limited - essentially just dial and hangup. You'd probably be better off setting up two cron jobs using the method I was outlining - one to dial, and one to hangup.
 
You don't need "cron". iCal will happily run a script for you. You can set an "alarm" for specific times every day.
 
If you want to get really fancy - you can put any details that are 'changing' into iCal, and then have the alarm run the applescript which parses out the details from iCal, and operates ABDialer to dial the specific number, and hangup.

Unfortunately, to automate a telephone via script is NOT what ABDialer is - you can only modify the dialing string to put numbers and pauses in it.

I tried playing around with AppleScript for you back near my second post, but it wasn't that easy to figure out for me (I program in structures languages (C/Java/PHP) )

EDIT - it may be simpler to break out XCode and write an App :p
 
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