[Noisebridge-discuss] Payphone! (or: sorry Mike, your awesome lamp is going away)

esc mediapathic at gmail.com
Fri Jan 9 11:20:31 UTC 2009


Seth and I did a bunch more work on the payphone tonight. It is
currently in a partially-assembled state, but when it is all plugged
in and reconnected to the voip box, it is now possible to:

*Get a dialtone.

*Dial out (but only 800 numbers, as that is a limitation of the free
voip service. Actual voip service pending/ under negotiations now
should allow non-800 numbers).

*Have two-way communication with the other party.

*Hang up! This may not seem exciting to anyone else, but it was
actually one of the more difficult problems we tackled. Trust me, it's
very exciting.

Our next step, I think, is to put this all together in a way that
doesn't involve a whole lot of alligator clips and hope, put it into
the payphone body, and put that body somewhere.

So, the questions for The People:

- I think it's pretty well-established at this point that we want this
inside rather than outside. The most compelling argument for this is
that if we put it outside it _will_ get messed with and probably taken
(either by individuals or TPC) unless we put prohibitively expensive
measures in place. Plus, personally, I think it's more fun to have a
phone we can play with in the space (especially once we have an
asterisk system up and running, see below) without having to go
outside. Dissenting opinions should be aired in this thread.

- Then the question becomes where to actually put it. My vote is for
one of two places. One is on the wall where the fire extinguisher is
now just to the left of the fishbowl door, but facing to the left,
essentially sitting on the table but mounted to the wall for safety.
The other possibility that just occurred to me is putting it on the
doubleheight shelf just inside the front door, to the right of the
monitor that is there now. It fits nicely there, I think that position
would encourage more immediate attention ("woah, you guys have a
payphone? awesome!" which also leads to the idea of whether or not to
keep all coins deposited as donations...), and as I think about it
more, is the option I like more. This would also be very easy from a
cabling perspective, as we wouldn't have to worry about going past a
doorway.

The other thing I wanted to bring up here, relatedly, is that I've
never set up an asterisk system, and would very much like to. I'd like
to requisition one of the rack units that came in recently to do so.
Any objections? Also, anyone want to give me any tips? I want to
tackle this untutored at first, but if there are any expensive
mistakes I should avoid I'd appreciate knowing about those in advance.

I would also here like to solicit wild speculation about wacky things
to do with the asterisk system. We have already considered the
possibility of having a voice that says when you insert a quarter:
"We're sorry, the call you are making requires an additional deposit
of negative twenty-five cents"

Go!

--esc



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