Here at my office, I am the only one in the department that prefers to use a headset to answer calls on. This has unfortunately led to a lot of confusion when people walk into my room and immediately start talking because they do not see the headset (or they just assume I am talking to myself). Does anyone know of a product that will either connect to a phone (I have a Cisco 7960) or that goes on the network and watches my specific extension on my FreePBX box and displays some sort of light to indicate that I am on the phone? I have a light above the door of my office so I may be able to wire it into that. Anyone have any ideas?
No, I can’t think of an easy way to do it.
If the server is located in the same building you could write a cron job to take the output of asterisk -rx ‘sip show channels’ | grep ext_num and if positive then set a bit high on the parallel port. You could then use a transistor to drive a relay and light a light. Or you could use an LED and drive it directly off the transistor.
Are you handy with electronics? Does the server have a parallel port?
If not several companies make little USB 8 bit A/D converters with linux drivers.
I can solder, but not great. I am in the same building, but not the same floor. I was wondering if there was a way to use the AUX port on my phone. Or, just a way to set off a trigger when the headset appears to be on. I’ll have to keep playing then.
What you want is a headset with a “firefly” in use indicator. The Plantronics S12 has one.