“I just got that album on CD and it sounds amazing.”

Wow. Big day if you’re into the iPhone. Which I am. So to wile away the hours until the Steve Jobs’ sermon, I thought I’d put up a post about a project I did a few years ago - my brick phone bluetooth headset project. It started with everyone’s fascination with the brick phones of yore, particularly the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X model. I bought several Motorola brick phones off of Ebay several years ago, both the tan ones and a few deep grey ones. The tan one is the archtypical ‘brick phone’ so it was the subject of the project.

The idea wasn’t to create a functioning phone, but rather, a bluetooth headset that connects to your modern phone, hidden in your pocket. So, first things first: I purchased a cheap SonyEricsson bluetooth headset that could be dismantled and fit into the shell of the empty phone. I tore into the Motorola with my Dremel tool, and emptied of all the innards.

With the help of the trusty glue gun, I mounted the bluetooth headset in such a way that it can be turned on and off by holding down the original button on the front face. The earpiece was glued in place inside the earcup of the phone body, and I also extended the new headset’s microphone to seat into the location of the original phone’s mic. To charge it, you slide the battery cover off, and connect the charging cord you see in the photo on the right. It’s an ugly hack, and my old high-school friend Tony (now an eletronics engineer) who’s helped me do a dozen projects like this will probably cringe when he sees this, but once it’s closed up, it’s looking about like it did 25 years ago.

“Relax, alright? My old man is a television repairman, he’s got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.” - Jeff Spicoli

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 21:59 and is filed under Common stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.