Hi, Well I wrote this way back in 2005 (most of the hacks were done during What The Hack 2005).

At that time skype was not as well known as it is today. But I was already completely hyped about it and implemented my own chat-cord software for linux along with the open hardware implementation you can see my work here:

For people unfamiliar with chat-cord. The above setup allowed me to call with a regular phone (see the old black phone) on skype. This was during the time no usb-skype phones existed yet and also in a time when skype still had global rates which were much lower than they are now (they had to raise their prices probably due to problems with the local telephone companies I imagine).

The commerical product was working on windows only (and still is), since I was such a linux fan I wrote some software to do the dialling under linux. And I also cooked up my own version with some schematics found on the net instead of buying the commercial chatcord (that is what you see in the picture so you can dial on the phone's buttons and it will dial this in skype much like the usb skype products available today but it was much cheaper and cooler at the time to do it the hackaday style way ;)).

More hardware pictures : chatcord hardware Software version 0.2(sorry still some api bugs which might be resolved in later skype version by now but no time to check into that currently...): chatcord api.

Sadly I never got around to closing a deal with the chatcord company for a commercial linux version. Then I completely forgot about the project because I was working so hard to finish up my PhD. 2 years later it turns out people are starting to notice this and Omri Cohen emailed me about it. So I decided to put 'my little secret linux skype dialling project' on my blog :) 

UPDATE (Sorry, I know some links and images are broken here, it happened somewhere this summer when the HD of my hetzner server crashed. Hopefully I can find them back somewhere in my backups, but it won't be soon).

 

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