[Noisebridge-discuss] Pulse-dialing payphone and Payphone T-key

[Jonathan Lassoff]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 1:46 PM, Jonathan Lassoff <jof at thejof.com> wrote:
> There's a beautiful old pulse-dialing payphone here at 2169. Since it
> seems that none of the ATAs here support detecting pulse dialing as
> signalling I bought a pulse dialing-to-DTMF adaptor to make use of it.
>
> Sadly... it doesn't seem to ring (just like the red phone). I'd like
> to pop into it and check out the ringer to see that there's nothing
> broken, though admittedly I've never seen a phone like this out in the
> wild (or ringing at that), so maybe this is from an era when payphones
> didn't have ringers?
>
> A long time ago I brought in a T-key for opening payphone chassis, but
> I can't find it anymore (I haven't laid eyes on it since 83C). Does
> anyone know where it might be or have one that I could borrow?

So, actually I got it all to work without a T-key. Mike Kan had a
great idea for using a tool hook as a level to actuate the T-key
mechanism in the phone. You can kinda jam it in like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thejof/5173799312/in/photostream/

So I got to the guts (
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thejof/5173194809/in/photostream/ ) and
found that the phone line was just screwed down to the wrong terminal
block. I moved it to the right one, and now the ringer works!

So I set it up on the phone shelf (
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thejof/5173194085/in/photostream/ ) and
set it up in asterisk (extension 2999, "payphone1"). It's also in a
little hunt group now so that when you call noisebridge, it rings the
Cisco IP phone and then the payphone.

Now if I can just get the RS-232 dongles for that acoustic coupler
sitting next to it and we'll be cooking with gas!

Cheers,
jof