I have managed to set up a few IAX2 and SIP extensions in order to play with soft-phones (mostly kiax and kphone).
However, by far the coolest part is the bluetooth channel (chan_bluetooth). Using a bluetooth dongle and a bluetooth phone (my T610 for example) i can make phone calls from my soft-phone to the real world.
Sample extensions.conf follows:
ignorepat => 9
exten => _9.,1,Dial(BLT/Me/${EXTEN:1})
exten => _9.,2,Playback(invalid)
exten => _9.,3,Hangup
You need to put this in the appropriate context (read asterisk manual for this).
Extensions that start with an underscore are pattern matching. so _9. reads: an extension that starts with 9 and has some more digits afterwards (the dot).
BLT/Me means BLT for Bluetooth channel and Me for the device name of my cell phone (configured at /etc/asterisk/bluetooth.conf).
${EXTEN:1} is a variable that will be substituted with the extension number dialed. the :1 part means to strip the first 1 number (so :3 means strip the first 3 numbers). This is because the first 9 is used to specify that we want an external line, not the actuall number to dial.
The second line is used if an invalid extension is dialed and the last one is to hangup afterwards.
Now, going to bluetooth.conf to configure our bluetooth settings. I am assuming that you have already set up bluetooth in general and you can find out information like your phones MAC address
;; Ericsson T610
[00:0E:07:3D:B1:FF]
name = Me
type = AG
channel = 3
autoconnect = yes
In brackets is my phones MAC address.
The name = Me is the name that we use in extensions Dial() command.
The type=AG means that it is a phone (as opposed to a headset ) the channel is the channel to use.
Now with a kiax (or another softphone) we can call as normal and you will see the phone calling the specified number.
I must note here that during my test i was able to call normaly, i could speak to the other party but i could not listen to the other party. I have not investigated into the matter so it may be wrong soft-phone settings , it may be wrong asterisk settings or simply attributable to the testing nature of chan_bluetooth.
At some later point i will go for opposite, which is to answer cell phone calls from my soft-phone. It should be possible.
I have also been having fun with Free World Dialup (FWD) services. Especially their IAX service offering whereby i can connect my asterisk and integrate their services with my network (eg call FWD subscribers using their number on a keypad).
Asterisk most absolutely positively rocks. And to think that i have not even purchased any hardware yet. Not even an X100P clone or an ATA.