Fixing a broken IP phone
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
So, those of you who know me will be aware that I love VoIP and Asterisk. So the other day was a very, very sad day for me. I had dropped my VoIP phone (the Avaya 4610SW IP.) The phone was only dropped half a meter from my chair onto thick carpet, but it still didn’t stop the demise of the device. You see, when you picked up the handset, the phone didn’t answer.. the speaker in the phone is not the best so it kind of defeated the purpose of having one now.
Dad had a set of keyed screws, and luckily enough, one of them could crack open the phone without any damage. Under close inspection, the button that the headset pushes on to hang up and answer the phone is connected to a leaver that rests on a button on the motherboard (as pictured below.) It took several hours of fiddling with the little springs and metal plates in the switch with the multimeter to figure out how it worked, then carefully trying to bend and place everything back into it’s rightful place (the spring had come out of it’s tracks in the fall.. I can’t believe how cheap the components used were in this phone.) Good news now! I have my phone back! 
The Switch
