Greetings all,
I've been working a project for a while that is finally nearly finished: giving my 7-year-old son a rotary phone that can only make and receive calls from a predetermined list of speed dial numbers. It essentially gives him a way to call his grandparents, his best friend, his aunt, etc, whenever he wants, and also receive calls from them. He loves the physical phone and the need to spin the rotary, and I love hearing a real phone bell ringing in the house.
Here's the basic components of the setup:
- Create a Google Voice phone number
- Set up the Google Voice phone number to be working on an OBi200
- Add in seven speed dial numbers (for numbers 2 through 8, as 1 and 9 can't be used)
- Block all outgoing calls except speed dials
- Block all incoming calls except speed dials
And here's additional bells and whistles I've added on:
- add an analog phone adapter to allow use of a rotary phone (www.dialgizmo.com)
- add an ethernet-to-wifi adapter to eliminate the need for a wired ethernet connection to the OBi200
- set Google Voice voicemail greeting to be a repeating busy tone for 20 seconds, discouraging anyone from leaving a message (as it is not monitored)
This has been great fun for my son, and I'm making an identical setup to give to his best friend (another 7-year-old), so they can call each other whenever they want.
So why am I posting? I'd love feedback from folks on how I configured the OBi200 unit, and see if there's any advice on how I can improve the overall config. Here's more specifics on the configuration:
Add in speed dial numbersI did this via the normal method of logging into my OBiTALK account, and in the "OBi Dashboard" section I selected "Speed Dials" and set up the numbers there. I'm content with only having singl-digit speed dials.
- Wanted to confirm there is no way to use speed dial #1 or #9?
- Is there any way to have the speed dial number saved in a User-Defined Digit Map? Would be nice to have only one place where I update the phone numbers that are allowed, rather than having to update twice (see below for where I need to update this for inbound call whitelist).
Block all outgoing calls except speed dialsWent to "Physical Interfaces -> PHONE 1" and modified "DigitMap" value to: ([2-8]S0|(Mpli))
- Any suggestions on improving this?
Block all incoming calls except speed dialsFirst created a User-Defined Digit Map named "Whitelist" that manually listed out all the numbers I wanted calls to come through on. Then went to "Voice Services -> SP1 Service" and modified "X_InboundCallRoute" value to: {(MWhitelist):ph}
- Any suggestions on improving this?
Thank you in advance for any help with fine-tuning this project. Totally recommend this for anyone with young kids!