A few weeks back i ordered a usb number pad, along with a usb voip handset. This was to help simulate the effect of a telephone, with the idea of somehow integrating it using my sketchy electronics knowledge into an actual telephone. After a disappointing trawl of the local charity shops yesterday to find a nice classic 1970’s retro phone i cracked and ended up heading over to Argos. Credit to them, i picked up a perfectly working new house telephone for £4.99. Sweet!
Mind, it was only perfectly working for a little while, as I proceded to rip out the guts of the thing pretty quickly. I wanted to get my USB number pad in the phone. The one thing i quickly discovered is that my brilliant plan was really not so brilliant at all. Without really paying much attention to the real world, i had decided all i needed to do was take the electrical stuff out the phone, and plonk (technical term) in my usb keypad. I obviously failed to notice that the buttons were spaced much closer together on the usb numberpad, so that once i had botched in the circuitry, pressing a middle key (0, 2, 5 & 8 ) it would press two buttons at once. The usb pad then did some bizarre calculation which ended up with a different number each time. Instead of being 0-9, it ended up being somewhere between 2000 and 5000. This was a real pain trying to convert these numbers back to relevant numbers to trigger sound files numbered 0 - 9.
With the short amount of time left i decided on aesthetics over funtionality, and kept the thing in the phone casing, making do with a less than perfect range of numbers. I wrote some failsafes, converting some of the more regular bizarre numbers to their corresponding correct values. Any anomolous ones would be replaced with a random number generated between 0 and 9. Not ideal, but most of the time the correct number was generated under testing so it only occasionally becomes the machines choice of sound clip.
I also took apart the USB voip phone, and put the innards of it into the phone receiver. It works perfectly, all you need to do is plug in both usb chords and its good to go! The only thing that is a bit weird is that the Mac gives the usb keypad a different name each time, so trying to automate the [hi] object is a pain!
