Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!vector!chinacat!telecom-gateway From: clements@bbn.com Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Home KSU ??? Message-ID: Date: 29 Nov 89 17:33:12 GMT Sender: news@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG Lines: 81 Approved: telecom-request@chinacat.lonestar.org X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 537, message 3 of 3 Following the thread on the Panasonic KX-T61610 small PBX... I have had mine for a week now. Mostly it's real neat. > The new model is the 61610 which is improved by: > [...] > o Deleting the very useful 25-pair connector on the 616 I haven't seen the older model, but I agree it is a pain getting those 22 modular connectors wired over to a 66-block. I bought out my local Radio Shack's supply of crimp-on modular connectors. > o Requiring at least one 616XX with LCD set to program It gives you a sort-of menu based input system using the text LCD on that phone. But I can't see any good reason for not supporting programming via a 2500 set. It won't do it, though. I finally gave in to the urge to look inside it last night. The technology is impressive. Two pretty-high tech PC boards, one with all the line interface logic and one with the controller/touch-tone and switching matrix. Lots of very dense ASICs with all those tiny tiny legs :-) The processor looks like a fairly standard member of the Hitachi 6300 family, with a 7.6 MHz crystal. It looks as though the program is in an external masked ROM, the only socketed chip in the system. I wonder whether I'll get carried away and try to disassemble the code to fix some features. [An aside: The last major disassembly I did was the code in my Atari "Superman" pinball machine. I was real impressed. I found a true multitasking real-time operating system with process spawning and run queues AND a pseudo-code interpreter for a pinball-oriented instruction set with recursion and conditionals. There are "instructions" like "Turn on lamp N", "Test rollover contact M" and "Make noise X" as well as "start subprocess" and "wait for subprocess". I had to teach my disassembler this new pseudo-code instruction set.] Features I would change if I could: . There is an "Executive Barge-In" function, but you can only do it from the custom phone sets, not from a 2500 set. And you can only force a conference, not a disconnect. Since the "people" I want to barge in on are things like computers and answering machines, I want to be able to disconnect them, not conference with them. The Panasonic answering machines drop off the line when another extension is picked up. But with the PBX, they don't see the line characteristics change when a conference call is started, so they don't drop off. This is the most serious backward step I observed when switching to the PBX from ordinary multi-line phones. . Some commands can only be done from the master extension (Extension 11. Ext numbers are 11 thru 26.) I would remove this restriction. I would also beef up the programming to allow a 2500 set to program all features. These two changes would allow external control by a computer through a modem or Watson interface. Alternatively, use the RS-232 port, but that would be a lot more work since that is just an output device now (except for Xon/Xoff for flow control). . To program system functions, you have to run down to the basement and set a "Program" switch and then go back to extension 11 and enter commands. Probably they did this for security, so you could have the box in a locked closet. I would add an "Enter programming mode" and "Leave programming mode" function. I wonder whether the gentleman who was controlling his 61610 with a PC Watson board would be willing to share his PC code. I tried to send email to him but I don't think it got there (or the answer didn't get back). I'm interested in doing the same thing. Enough for now. Maybe we need a 61610-hackers mailing list :-) Bob Clements, K1BC, Clements@bbn.com, [w](617)873-3612