More fun with Door Phones.

Jeff,

This took a little tinkering, but I fixed something else that was wrong with mine in the process. I do not know how to open the door, but I can make it auto answer when someone pushes the button.

Set up the FXS extension in FreePBX and change immediate to yes. Put this extension in a different context. Here is my test context.

[from-junk]
exten => s,1,answer()
exten => s,n,playback(touchtone1)
exten => s,n,hangup()

As soon as you pick up the phone, it starts playing the touchtone1 file. Don't laugh at my context name :)

Happy Channukah

Would anyone know if i can connect a greandstream ATA, and set the "Dial this telephone number when off hook" option to the ring group, and let us push "5" if we want to open the door?

As well, if nobody answers, or after we hang up the phone- will the person outside hear the busy signal? This is my main concern- about whether or not the Panasonic would hang up the call.

Thank you very much

Oh. What I'm just planning on doing is just cutting off the pots lines from the panasonic box and plugging the grandstream's analog port into an existing phone jack. Then on the grandstream just set the option to dial a # when off hook.

I'm just worried about hanging up, or no answer.

I'm doing a very similar thing in my job right now. We've got an old Panasonic KX-T61610 whose only function now is to run the door phone. (Everything else is using our Trixbox.)

The door phone is set to ring extension 11 on the Panasonic KSU (I don't know if that's the default or not, but that's how ours is programmed). I put one end of a one-pair telephone cord into the KSU's extension 11, and the other into the Trixbox's FXO port (on a TDM card).

In Trixbox, I've got an incoming route set for that specific Zaptel channel that goes into a ring group of my office phones. (The ring group has an announcement at the beginning, which I find helps to start the audio on the door phone.) If no one answers the call, it's terminated (with an appropriate announcement, of course).

If I could have found a SIP doorphone for a reasonable price, I would have ditched the entire Panasonic system entirely. But, since we already had the hardware, it was a simple process.

I've used the Pancode from ITS Telecom. It can be found here: http://www.its-tel.com/info.asp?id=48

It connects to Trixbox through SIP.

I used analog versions (Pantel and Pancode) few times with fxs cards and it works fine. Advantage of analog is that you can use old wiring, it does not need CAT5. And it's much cheaper then SIP version.

Re: ATA, I have one I could experiment with. It hasn't been used in years. But, how would you get it to automatically connect when the doorbell is rung, automatically hang up when the door-call is ended, and it has to auto answer if I call the door from an extension.

Can all that be done? It didn't come with any documentation.

I used a Pantel with a TDM400. These units are not cheap but they can be programmed in various ways. In trixbox I made a dialplan injection where the doorphone goes to a ring group. with immediate=yes on the extension. The extension is a hotline to the doorphone ring group which rings as soon as the Call button is pressed.
This should work with any pot phone, but the Pantel can also be programmed to decode received digits from the far end and operate a built-in relay with contacts (and power if needed) for a doorlock.
I also modified dialparties.agi to give it a distinctive ring. Now it's as good as my 15-year-old Panasonic.

Thanks Scott

I've learnt a lot from this forum, so I'm happy to be able to contribute as well.

John

Did you manage to get the KX-T30865 to work ?? im stuck in the same situation, changed the dial plan on the PAP and can dial an extension but not able to hangup so its free to use again.

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about the KX-T30865, but ...

You can set up a custom context for the door phone and use the L(x) option in the Dial command, where x is the maximum duration of a call in milliseconds. The following in extensions_custom.conf will terminate any call from the doorphone after 20 seconds if you've specified my_custom_context as the context for the doorphone extension.

[my_custom_context]
exten => 123,1,Set(CALLERID(name)=Front Door)
exten => 123,2,Dial(Local/123@from-internal, 30, L(20000))
exten => 123,3,Hangup()

The 30 in the Dial command terminates the dialing attempt after 30 seconds if there's no answer.

I haven't tested this exact code, so you may have to fiddle with it. But we successfully use something similar here.