Traditionally for the 5th anniversary the gift is wooden. So, since I had just set up Astrisk and FreePBX I went on Ebay and found another gem. I will try to find pictures of the phone as it was when I received it, but as you can imagine for $35 it required a little TLC. Here is the cleaned up phone. I knew this project was beyond my skill level when I took it on, but with the work I did with threads in the radio project ( http://hackaday.io/project/1251-Radio ) this should be able to move along now. I hope that there will be updates some time soon.
Very cool and nice find. How do you plan to place calls? I noticed in the VoIP Phone overview that it will do text to speech to make calls, but if used in that way you lose the ability to talk to the person you're calling.
Right now the function is as such... You pick up the receiver, and the phone asks "Who would you like to call?" and you give it a number "1234567890" and the phone reads it back to you and asks if it is correct and it accepts a "yes" "no" response. This was all working acceptably, but could use some improvement. The problem that I think that I am having is that after this exchange is complete, and the phone number variable is saved I am not releasing the sound card (essentially ending one program so that I can begin another).
The phone will successfully call the number given, but the sound card is tied up so that you can't talk.
In the end the ability to talk with someone should not be lost due to the text to speech because it is only using the text to speech and speech to text to simulate the "operator experience", but I have done something wrong with it. What i think that I will do first is get it working on a pc and then move it to the phone. That is what I did for the radio project and seemed to help things move along quickly. It definitely made it easier to determine what was a programming problem and what was a setup problem.
Thank you for the link to Sparkfun! I have 2 old phones waiting to go back "online"
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=D5D0DFB80E9DD49!93227&authkey=!ANeCWw3bXROe9Cg&v=3&ithint=photo,jpg