Capture Caller ID from landline and use on IOS and Android device [closed]

Question

We are currently planing to build a Point Of Sale application for Restaurant. The biggest problem we face is to decide whether to develop the application for IOS or Android, we couldn't figure out how to capture the CID ** from the landline call to the our application.

We have found many devices and external modems which support other programming languages but none of them support IOS and Android. What would be your suggestion to achieve that.

** Caller ID (caller identification)

Regards.

Answer 1

Most of the USB Caller ID supports Windows only, if you want to get the Caller ID from the landline and use it on any mobile app, I guess your best option would be use a Raspberry Pi to build the hardware yourself

NCID is a popular package used by the Raspberry Pi community to get the Caller ID, there are lots of tutorial on the web. Here's a great example: http://geekswithblogs.net/MobileLOB/archive/2016/07/06/caller-id-on-raspberry-pi.aspx

But beware of your Caller ID format, you may need to convert the format before sending to the modem, this guy bought an extra hardware to convert DTMF format to FSK format for his modem https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/3nls9m/callerid_for_the_visually_impaired/

Once you get the data in your pi, you can use any method to send the data to your app, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ultrasonic whatever.

Answer 2

To answer properly you must provide some more information, but I can suggest one optional solution:

On android, if your landline modem is accessible via tty, (or tty emulation), that means you can access it using regular serial channel. In such cases it will be possible to simply listen to the serial channel and interact with the modem using AT commands.

Upon incoming call, you should be able to get a string from the modem with the caller ID.

Writing a system service that reads from the serial line is not a big task, you may even write an application that access the serial line directly on some devices (there are some modem manager apps or serial terminal apps on the google play). I hope you find this answer helpful.