Bluetooth hack

[gfish]

I was browsing Etsy the other day, and I noticed someone selling "steampunk communicators". As in Star Trek TOS flip communicators. Which looked pretty neat, but they were display only. No working parts.

"Well, that's kind of silly," I said to myself. "How hard could it be to take a cheap Bluetooth earpiece and make a steampunk version that actually worked with your cell phone?"

One $20 Best Buy purchase later, I started to find out.



First I worked out a simple mounting system using 0-80 screws and a backing plate. Then I started experimenting with faceplate templates. The important thing was that the buttons (power, volume up, volume down) still needed to work. I did this in OpenOffice Draw, by the simple expedient of scanning the circuit board and drawing the plate template directly onto this image. Here you can see the second plate after I kept cutting away bits of it until the buttons worked. The printout shows the third plate design, incorporating the new changes.

(Those two weird lines on the template are due to a very annoying bug which seems to prevent you from merging shapes if you're bridging the hole in one. I worked my way around it later by inverting the shape, but grrrr.)



Here is the third revision in brass. The buttons worked (a bit stiff, but certainly functional)! Except I suddenly realized it looked unpleasantly like the Golden Arches. That was a minor enough change not to require a separate iteration in brass, but I did modify the shape a bit. Now it needed some decoration, and I've been having such fun with brass etching...



The lovely and talented ladydrakaina was kind enough to donate her calligraphy skills. This is the result after I touched it up using GIMP. Which I thought was going to look awesome once etched, but I wanted to up my game a bit when it came to the etching. So far I've been etching, spraying with black paint, and sanding down the raised, unetched sections. Which works, but the paint is a bit flat, visually, and takes forever to dry. So I wanted to try aging/antiquing the surface chemically.



After some web research I decided to try using ammonia. I took some scrap brass, including some etched pieces, and tried both submersing them in ammonia and just exposing them to concentrated fumes. What seemed to work best was quick submersion followed by extended vapors, but the results were inconsistent. I think the surface needs to be very carefully cleaned first, but more testing is needed.



But I didn't let that stop me tonight -- blame the caffeine. I brushed ammonia over the etched piece, and then let it soak in the fumes above a small pool of ammonia. Blech.



The end result was very pleasing. Not quite the dark black-green I was aiming for, but still very acceptable. After a run to the Night Kitchen I got to work with my drill press and jeweler's saw.



...I think I overshot steampunk entirely and ended up in ancient Greece. Or maybe it's Elvish? Either way, I'm not complaining. I'm quite happy, in fact. It's definitely too heavy to wear without the ear loop now, but it's comfortable enough otherwise. The Bluetooth connectivity isn't noticeably impacted by the metal plate, either. It is, as they say, fully functional.

I'm going to have to set up an Etsy store tomorrow and see what I can sell these for. Now that I have the plate template and techniques down, cranking them out will be fairly easy. The patina will be a bit different on each, and I want to play with more faceplate decorations. A geometric one, one with gears, maybe a finger printish one? And I could always do custom ones as well. I also have some ideas for a much fancier Bluetooth hack, but I doubt I could get the price-point down low enough to really sell those.

Comments

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Well, do you need something else with a fancy etched brass plate on it? :)