there is now a payphone outside Omni - sudo-discuss

19 Oct 2015

tonight Robb and I bolted a payphone to the outside of The Omni, next to 
the front door (on the right).  There is no coin box or cover, and the 
coin slot is filled solid with hot glue.

it's wired to a VOIP box inside with the door opener computer.

There is an asterisk server in sudoroom made entirely by Robb, which 
provides telephone service to the VOIP box on the payphone, as well as two 
other VOIP phones so far - one for sudoroom and one for CCL.

The "phone numbers" are
sudoroom:            SUDO# (7836#)
counter culture labs: CCL# (225#)
front door:          LULZ# (5859#)

the asterisk computer is running "FreePBX" and I have no idea how it 
works.  Robb is the expert but he is just getting started/

My vision for the system is thus:

Person picks up payphone, gets an immediate recorded message saying 
"Welcome to the Omni.  Please enter the extension of the collective you 
are trying to reach, or 1 for a directory" and then have it give a 
directory if you press 1.  Then when the collective picks up the phone, 
they hear that you're outside the door and they can "buzz" the door open 
by pressing * or whatever on their phone.  (Insert magic asterisk script 
here)

Person outside presses the doorbell button:

Instead of the doorbell ringing, the button goes to a computer which then 
calls the payphone, causing it to ring (yes it rings).  Person who pressed 
the doorbell button answers the phone, and hears the above message, since 
a "doorbell" is really not appropriate for a space like the Omni.
(We can still have it be wired to the doorbell but it should do the above 
and get the people to use the payphone to contact the collective they 
want)

There is no limit on the number of phones we can add.  We can put them all 
over the Omni and probably all over the world with a tiny bit of network 
routing.  Also if you have nice non-cordless telephones (not rotary 
though) please consider donating them to the project.  Or VOIP boxes.

I don't think we should tie the system into the regular telephone system, 
for several reasons.  But I do think we should allow hackerspaces around 
the world to tie into it and be able to call sudoroom and CCL and each 
other, but we will have to see what the network traffic adds up to on our 
DSL.

Please get in contact with me or Robb if you have ideas for the system or 
want to help administrate it.  We have no idea how to operate Asterisk or 
FreePBX.

thank you
-jake