Where to get a phone:
Thrift stores, antique stores, eBay, shopgoodwill.com, Mom's house? Aladdin's Basement in Bellingham has some, from basic $15 cheapos to elaborately-priced very cool antiques.
Rotary phones and push-button phones work fine. Rotary phones are way cooler but push-buttons are cheaper and sometimes are shaped like lips and dogs and stuff. Cordless phones work fine! Avoid exotic old phones from other countries.
Make sure the phones work, especially the ringers, before you buy them!
Phones should use an RJ11 (a.k.a "modular") jack. Some very modern phones have 8-pin RJ45 ethernet jacks; RJ11 is 2-pin or 4-pin and is smaller.
How to set it up:
Get yourself a telephone (new or old, rotary or push-button) and a cord, plug the phone into your TeleHamster box, and plug the box into your internet router and into a power outlet.
Customize the machines
You can add an answering machine to your TeleHamster phone!
You can add a mechanical dial-style Christmas light timer to control when your phone can and can't operate.
Router not in a convenient location? Get a wifi extender with an ethernet port and set that up where you want the phone.
You might be able to plug your box into one of your phone jacks and use any other jack in your house for your phone(s). Let me know (TELE, 8353) if you get this working! You may need to sever your connection to the outside world to ensure you aren't getting a carrier signal from the phone company.
Troubleshooting
Please never press the hard-reset button on your black box (the one you can only hit with a pin)!
After you change something about how the box is plugged into an ethernet port, unplug and re-plug the power supply and wait 5 minutes for the box to power up and try to make contact with the internet and the server.
There are three blue lights on your box.
The top one tells you the power is on.
The one on the right "NET" tell you the box is connected to the internet.
The one on the left, when it glows solid, tells you that you are connected to the TeleHamster server. If the light on the left is not glowing solid, you will not be able to make or receive calls.
If all three lights are glowing solid, everything is good on our end; any issues you have are probably problems with your phone.
If none of the three lights are glowing, make sure the box is plugged into a power source.
If only the top light is glowing, make sure your box is plugged into an ethernet port. If it's plugged into a wifi range extender but the NET light isn't on, try plugging it directly into your router instead. If that does the trick, then it's a problem with the wifi range extender. If that doesn't do the trick, leave everything plugged in and let us know.
If the top and right lights are solid but the left light is dark, power down and then up again, wait 5 minutes. If that doesn't fix it, leave everything plugged in and let us know.
If the top and right lights are solid and the left light is blinking, make sure your phone is hung up. If that doesn't stop the blinking, unplug your phone from the box. Now note which lights are solid and go to one of the steps above.
