Obi2162 with Plantronics CS540

COVID has made many of us rethinking our remote-work setup. With the whole family home it became clear that I needed a better phone and one with a headset, since I spend a lot of time on calls. I use Google Voice as my main home/work/cell number as it gives me the flexibility to be anywhere, without needing to worry about missing calls. 

I purchased the Obi2162 (part of Obihais' OBi2000 Series Gigabit IP Phone range). I separately purchased a Plantronics CS540 headset. While they worked together out of the box, the Plantronics phone lifter - which is used to mechanically lift the handset when the button on the headset is pressed - was finicky. It didn't appear to have the strength to lift and put down the phone, likely because of the angles allowed by the phone stand and the physical shape of the phone.

I realized the need for an electronic hook (a device which electronically connects a wireless headset and phone). For those looking, you'll need two cables - first an OBiEHS cable from Obi, and secondly an APS-11 cable from Plantronics. The OBiEHS was $40 which is exorbitant for a cable, especially considering the phone itself was only $90. The OBiEHS comes with straightforward instructions and connecting the two took about 30 seconds. Work calls may never be the same again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excel - Adding an existing Pivot table to the data model

Image
  I've been working more with, and continue to be amazed by, Power Pivot. I recently ran into an issue where I needed to add the data for an existing Power Pivot report to the Data Model. There is a checkbox that makes this easy when creating a PivotTable: As so often happens, the analysis grew in scope/importance and I found myself needing to add the data to the data model. While it's not obvious how, there is a way to add an existing Pivot table to the data model. There's a More Tables... link in the PivotTable Fields pane.  Clicking on the  More Tables... results in a dialog confirming that you want to Create a New PivotTable .  Doing so will result in the creation of the new PivotTable in a new sheet. By default the data is added to the data model. You'll likely lose some formatting but for anything other than a trivial PivotTable, this should save effort, as it did for me.
Read more

Mirth

Image
Introduction Let's talk about Mirth. At it's simplest, Mirth  link is an Open Source HL7 interface engine. HL7 (Health Level 7) is an NPO involved in the development of healthcare standards and the HL7 v2.x and HL7 v3 standards are commonly used in Medical Information for data interchange - including but not limited to clinical, financial, logistical and administrative messaging. I first ran across Mirth over a year ago on a personal quest to find an alternative to our client's legacy HL7 application. Academically, I wrote a number of lexical analysis tools using lexx, yacc, bison and JavaCC and knew the challenges of writing and maintaining complex parsers. I was simply looking for something that could parse HL7 for us, and perhaps log messages and provide a little more transparency than our application currently allowed.  A year later and our legacy application is still going strong (read: my proposal was declined), but Mirth is being used in production, far away from th
Read more

Getting Started with Mirth (Part 1)

Image
This is the first post in a 2 part series. The second post is here Recently I posted about my positive experience when using Mirth by Webreach as an open source communication layer between one of our in-house applications and a third party and proprietary web service interface. That post received a large amount of attention (relative to my other posts :o) ) so now I will post a quickstart guide to creating a similar setup. In this post I will go over the very basics of using Mirth (please dig in and play around with some more advanced options/configurations), specifically I will demonstrate how to use Mirth to read data from a database, package the data up in a SOAP envelope, send the data to a web service and process the SOAP response. I'll also show you how easy it is to monitor channels once deployed. Once you've installed and opened Mirth for the first time you'll be presented with an empty dashboard - but it wont stay empty for long. This is where you'll s
Read more