The telephone can be used to extend the communication neighborhood of the robot. Standing next to the telephone will allow the robot to detect, connect with, and broadcast to certain peers outside of the room.
The Inter-Robot Communication Interface
The programmer’s interface to robot to robot communication is through virtual files that can be accessed through the Varvara-style file device, in a scheme inspired by (but not compatible with or sharing implementation with) Derek Stevens' xrvs game server system Programs using the (v1) environment can find communication tools mounted at the following paths
/net/neighborhood/services/and/net/neighborhood/clients/
Reading /net/neighborhood/services/ or /net/neighborhood/clients/ will produce a Varvara-style directory listing containing an entry for each potential peer in range. In the case of /services/ there will be an entry for nearby broadcasters, and for /clients/ there is an entry for every peer that has responded to service broadcasts by this device. Reading to or writing to that entry will send data or read buffered data from that peer. Data written will be sent in order, and the order of data read is guaranteed as long as there is sufficient buffer space available.
/net/neighborhood/broadcasts/
Writing a file into /net/neighborhood/broadcasts/ will broadcast a service associated with that file such that potential clients in the neighborhood can detect and read the message that was written, and establish client connections with the broadcaster.
/net/error
/net/error will contain metadata describing the last networking error encountered by the robot. It is acceptable (and advisable) to delete /net/error after processing the error, the file will be regenerated with new contents on new errors.