[Les] had thousands of dollars of expensive IP Telephone infrastructure at his fingertips, so he figured he might as well play around a bit – after all, what good is all that equipment if you can’t have a little fun?
Inspired by the “Awesome Button” featured on Make, he started thinking about what sort of feature he would like to have available at the push of a button. He must have had Travis Tritt on the brain the day he started building his creation, since he named it the “The Call Someone Who Cares Button”.
[Les] picked up an “emergency stop” button from eBay, wiring it to a TeensyUSB, just as it was done in the Make article. He mapped the button to the pause/break key, then whipped up a bit of C#code that listens for that key to be pressed. When toggled, the button sets forth a series of events that gets his boss on the line ASAP.
It’s a fun little project, and while I might have built a button that introduces fake static and echo into the line before dumping the call, I think it’s pretty cool all the same.
Since it seems that just about everyone has built some derivation of the Awesome Button, share yours with us in the comments, and be sure to stick around to see a quick video demo of the CSWC button in action.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLzkUqZnaNA&w=470]
Here’s The Button I ended up building for my Photo Booth. Based on the AWESOME button, of course.
Shurely Fake. Like we’re supposed to believe there’s a boss who cares.
I have a big red button at my work desk, it locks my computer, nothing special, but lots of fun.
I need one of those!
I have a Staples Easy button that I reworked last year with a board and guts from an adult toy store to swear a different profanity (out of 10) when you press it.
It quickly became the office “Easy-swear” that people would walk by just to push (it’s fairly loud) and makes for a bit of fun in the middle of a stressful workday!
Should wire it to USB and hit ctl-alt-del repeatedly ;)
Some jerk calls you asking about something you don’t care about, so you hit the button and the jerk gets redirected to your boss so you don’t have to talk to the jerk?
Is that how it’s supposed to work, because that’s the only way that seems to make sense to me… but that’s not how it was described in the top posting.
I am pretty dumb though, so maybe I’m having one of my episodes.
@wardy
I took that more as a “you called the wrong person, I have no idea what you’re talking about” thing.
I used this kind of button sometime ago to fill my coffe maker : http://www.instructables.com/id/Smart-Button/
@wardy The idea came from a co-worker who kept getting annoying people coming up and interrupting her at her desk. So when this happens, you just hit the button and give them your desk phone. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about, here’s someone that cares”
Think of it as a geek speed dial.
But the iptel system is way cool and yes it could do divert-annoying-call to the boss or (not that we did this in testing, no way) make the bosses desk phone in his other office phone the local strip joint…
I’d be more inclined to see this bring the boss in on a conference call, and hear when people are being hostile with you for no reason.
I’m sure it wouldn’t take too much to tweak the code to do this instead?