Power Corrupts, For Now

It’s been four days since I got the Siemens S685IP phone system installed and working. All appeared fine at first. I thought myself clever for a DIY conversion to US power supplies. And, well, one of the three handsets is functioning perfectly. The other two drained their batteries and will not charge them.

At first I thought it may just be a matter of some flaky rechargeable batteries. So I went to my local Radio Shack, which is more convenient than Fry’s, and bought some AAA size NiMH rechargeables to replace those provided by the manufacturer. No joy. A day later they’re discharged and the phones won’t charge them for some reason.

So it appears that I may have one working charging stand and two disfunctional units. I wonder if it could be the handsets? To determine this I’m presently charging one of the “faulty” units in the known working charging stand.

The factory provided PSUs were 4.0 vdc @ 150 mA. The universal PSUs that I substituted provide 4.5 vdc @ 300 mA. I can see no reason why they should have a problem. I was very careful to maintain the polarity of the power supplies. Taking a DVM to the charging stands they all measure the same voltage and polarity at the pins.

If I put a new set of batteries into the phones they work fine, as long as the batteries hold out. As an experiment I may rebuild one of the 230 vac PSUs and plug it into a step-up transformer and see if that works better. Since I work for a UK based company I occasionally have to used UK based equipment over here, and thus I have such a transformer on hand.

I’ll be away much of the coming week so I can’t put these phone into serious service yet. I need the power issue 100% resolved.

OTOH, I was able to get the contact list from our old Panasonic KSU into a vcard format and imported into the one working Siemens handset. It looks like each handset has it own contact list. These can be uploaded & downloaded via the web interface.

It should be a simple matter to create a script that reformats the XML contact list used for a Polycom phone into a vcard format for the Siemens. But the contact list still has to be pushed to the Siemens handset.