International Business Machines Corporation

Rolm Company

Gary R Key

David C Black

Elie Antoun Jreij

Michael G Duncan

Tave P Dunn

Robert D Whittington

Timothy L Wilson

William E Levene

Gautam Biswas

Gordon D Leak

A telephone includes means for switching the LEDs, on the face of the phone, between a normal operating mode in which the lights indicate the status of telephony features, such as mute or hold, to a diagnostic operating mode in which the LEDs indicate the status of the telephone's data communications signals. The modes are toggled by entry of a code on the telephone keypad or by way of a command from a workstation coupled to the telephone by way of a data communications port.

Data diagnostics with leds on the face of a telephone

Method for determining the baud rate of a data stream by comparison of captured data to known autobaud characters. Samples are received from the communication device and stored in memory until a set of the samples are accumulated. Then, a sample clock is divided in half and the odd numbered samples are compared to a set of known autobaud characters. If a match occurs, then the sample clock is assumed to be correctly synchronized with the incoming serial data stream. If a match does not occur, then the even samples are recirculated and eight more samples are collected. The sample clock is again divided in half and the odd numbered samples are compared to the set of known autobaud characters. If a match occurs, then the sample clock is assumed to be correctly synchronized with the incoming data stream. These steps are repeated until an autobaud character match is found or an error situation is determined.

Automatic baud rate detection

A dynamically configurable telephone 10 has an intelligent controller 42 which implements a communication protocol to receive commands and parameters and to transmit status indicative of particular phone features. Upon receipt of the parameters, the controller translates the parameters into configuration settings for the telephone and also stores the parameters in a non-volatile memory 44 if such is installed. The telephone accommodates many different country-specific requirements without hardware or firmware changes being made to the phone itself. The controller returns solicited or unsolicited status messages, or events, to a PABX 14 over a bit serial digital data link 12. An event can be indicative of error conditions, such as data packet errors, timeouts, or data storage errors. An event can also be a reply to a previously received command, such as configuration status, internal test results, a phone serial number or a controller firmware revision level.

Dynamically configurable telephone

Growing community of inventors

Round Rock, TX, United States of America

Gary R Key