[jgonino]

My new job has me working the help desk a lot, and I am using a wired headset to answer calls. This means that I cannot listen to music, for fear of missing a call.


I am looking for someone to help design and build the following:

I am calling it an audio injector:

Basically, take the input from my phone (Shoretel IP phone, outputs a standard RJ11 jack), and the input from an audio source, and make them able to output to one pair of headphones and a microphone.

Ideally, I would get some K701's, and use a stand alone microphone with a mini plug.


So here it is:

Mini plug/RCA inputs, along with a RJ11 input from phone.

Some kind of Electronic Relay/or micro controller to sense the input voltage, or if that is too hard, just a switch.

2 mini jacks, one to output sound/voice calls to the headphones, and another to accept a microphone input.



Ideas?


MSpaint picture

:

 

[ronin74]

Is this what you're looking for? or some facsimile thereof.

 

[jgonino]

No, I need one that works with a "Phone" kind of phone. Like one you would have on your desk.

I have an iphone, and it works fine for that.

 

[synaesthetic]

As I work in a call center I know how you feel, though it would be headache-inducing for me to attempt something like this.

A "slow day" means there's twenty or so seconds between calls instead of 200 in queue for ten hours straight. -_-

And I've just been trained on the other system... another newspaper with six million subscribers, any given dozen thousand of them crying about their newspaper at one time or another. =|

 

[jgonino]

See, I'm in IT support, so I don't really have that many calls. I am a Desktop Tech/Help desk guy, so sometimes I am sitting at my desk working on fixing another issue, and I get maybe a call every 8 minutes.

The company I work for is not small, but we have a small IT team, and most of the issues get passed to the QA people upstairs.

 

[utilisateur]

If your were using a standart phone you could probably hook up a simple circuit to the line voltage or the bell tap but using an IPPhone ..

You want to use the output that is normaly going to the wired headset right?

How are you informed of your calls?Is the call just picked up automatically,hence your fear of missing a call?

 

[d-cee]

I work for a company that sells call centre headsets. At work I have a select switch that switches between 2 inputs, one is an RJ phone plug and the other is 2 x 3.5mm jacks (one for audio one for mic)

However, this just passes through the signal and does no mixing of any kind. It is also completely passive and isn't affected by the wiring of the RJ plug or voltage passing through it.

You may not be aware, but unfortunately not all headsets are the same, so a project that you propose above will need to be tailor made for your particular configuration, and should you change phones in future it may stop working.

I say this because although most use the RJ-11 plug, their pin-outs, polarity and voltages differ. Then there are headsets that feature pre-amplification (higher sensitivity) and there are other ones that require a dedicated amplifier. These will all introduce obstacles in your design.

 

[synaesthetic]

Probably your best bet would be to fiddle with the phone to make it actually ring instead of just give a whispertone, and wear a pair of open headphones.

 

[-=Germania=-]

Here is how I would do it so that it would be interchangable:

I would buy a cheapo phone and dissasemble it - removing the mic,and wiring the speaker output to two RCA's. Wire the mic to the mono 1/8 output. I would get rid of the buttons and focus just on the passthrough.

Then I would hook it up to an AMP with dual inputs preferably.

If you do not have an amp with the separate inputs, I would build the RCA inputs into the phone box.

The point is that I would not build this into a headphone amp, it lacks versitility.

If you go with option a, you could just do a PTP box and make the cost minimal.

You could use some adapters to do the same thing as part B.

This would be cheap to do; I think you would only need the parts.

 

[Budgie]

As Germania suggests- you need audio out of the phone. After that it is simple to use a small mixer to combine several sources together and control them. The only tough part is getting the audio out of the phone.

 

[utilisateur]

I thought it was about muting the music input to the phones?
If the call goes right through and is mixed with the music wouln't it need to be louder?and hence surpas the level of a normal phone conversation?

Wichever way you go i think you will need to have a look inside the phone or atleast the headset to gain information about your possible connecting points

 

[synaesthetic]

No, he wants a circuit that mutes the music input whenever a signal appears over the phone input.

 

[axiom]

Personally, I think it would be annoying to have the music muted every time a call came through. I would either miss some of the music or completely forget to pause the player and miss a lot!

You could also consider rigging up an annoying flashing light to let you know when signal is coming through the phone input. It would need to be annoying enough to be noticed through your sonic enjoyment

. It should be straightforward to use the signal that the phone would be sending to pulse the led light.

Just another suggestion. Good luck with your implementation.

 

[ericj]

I've thought about this one before, though i dreamed about doing it with a DT290 headset.

The tricky part is whether you want to hook up to the handset jack like a plantronics headset, or whether the phone system you're plugging into lets you connect a POTS-type phone. Sometimes you have a phone on your desk - toshiba phones are this way for example - where the inner pair on the jack is POTS (plain old telephone system) and the outer pair is the digital stuff - the signals that tell you what extension is calling you, let you select lines, etc. In this case, you could put a splitter on the phone jack, keep your feature-rich pbx phone, and have your headset gear as well.

For best results, you'd hope for the latter.

In that case, I'd get one of the headset phones that provide a full blown phone w/ keypad. You can get these - I've got one - but i'm not sure what search queries will make google turn one up. It's just a palm-sized unit with a keypad and a toggle switch for answering or hanging up the phone, and another for muting the mic. If you're really lucky, you can bolt it's keypad flush to a project box.

A lot of the time, these are going to have a piezo wafer on the back of the unit that does the ringing when you get an incoming call.

Desolder that, attenuate the signal and run it into one of your mixer channels. Now you have an audible ring tone on your headphones.

Take the headset audio out, run that into another mixer channel.

Take the mic input and hook it up to the jack for your headset.

Add headphone amp, volume controls for music, telephone, and ring tone.

For extra credit, tap the 'answer/hang up' toggle on the keypad and hook up a circuit that automatically attenuates the music to background levels when you pick up the phone line.

For even more fun, don't go nuts on the built in headphone amp and instead put an external out/in loop on it so that you can take the output from the mixer and run it into your favorite tube amp, and then back into the headset unit so you can more conveniently hook up whatever funky connectors you have on your DT290 or similar.

For spit polish, use up some more mixer channels for an omnidirectional mic mounted inside the headset unit, hooked up to a momentary switch, so you can hear your surroundings without taking off the headphones - kinda like the Shure PTH device.

I was seriously going to build something like that, and then suddenly i didn't have a job where i had to answer the phone.

 

[AudioCats]

it is easier to tap the signals from the desk phone's handset and send to a switch box, which switches between the music input and deskphone input. your 701 plugs into the switch box's output. Tap the deskphone's ringtone and send to the switch box as the third input. There will be a control circuit to switch in the ring tone when the phone "rings".
So this is what will happen:
A) if there is no call, flip the switch to "music" and enjoy.
B) when a call comes in, the ring tone signal triggers the control which cuts off the music and you hear a ring tone in the 701.
C) Then you manually flip the switch to "call" and take the call.
D) After the call, flip the switch to "music" again and back to step A).

It will require modding a handset (or head set), perform ring tone signal tapping (done to the desk phone) and making a toggle switch box.

I doubt your company policy will allow you to use it though.