Unboxing porn pan1720-br

So begins my roadtest of the Bluetooth modules. First impression is nifty case! Open it up and a nice pair of usb dongles and a paper telling me to go to a website. It's in German. This may be a long road to test...

The Altoids tin

 I ordered some parts from Mouser, and picked up some from Radio Shack. The wife asked what I was up to which came with the usual... Nuthin... She knows better. I saw this link on one of my Favorite Websites I saw what he had done, but I thought with a few changes I might be able to do a bit better. I decided that instead of a normal open switch that you have to set it off to disable the alarm, I would instead use a reed switch. This would allow me to open it up to get one out, while palming the magnet, then hand it to the intended victim (let's say, my wife) and it goes off when she opens it up. 

 So the whole thing runs off a 555 timer. Here are a pair of them. I bought the stuff for two so that I could make two (and sell one) I also picked up a smaller speaker. UNFORTUNATELY the 1N914s I picked up were surface mount, and I didn't actually order a reed switch, just the magnet. Well I'll have to use the magnet anyway, I picked up some through hole diodes  (and a PCB) at Radio Slack and began the process of bread-boarding. I wanted to breadboard it so that I knew that it would work before spending time soldering it. That makes sense. I would love to say that it went together smoothly... Alas it did not. It got pushed aside, and forgotten. Over time parts got moved, project got set aside, picked back up, put back down...  I finally (after the tardis light even) got back around to working with this. I soldered it all onto a protoboard and it didn't work. I poked, prodded, cussed, stamped my feet, left it, came back, and gave up.

I gave up hope for real and set about to desoldering all the components. By the time that was all done I had decided to 'dead bug' it. For the rest of the world, that is an artful composition of components, harmoniously placed together... for me it's two vodka and cokes, a hot soldering iron and a ton of hot glue.

it worked

Most bizarre thing I've seen, but it worked. I've shown it around had a few laughs with it, surprised a few people, and played a tune that was exactly like the Dr Who theme doesn't sound like. I didn't post a pic, because really... its a 9v battery lead going into a giant blob of hot glue wired to a speaker... I doubt the TSA would let me through with it... 

a quest for a home for TBP

I had it housed in an Altoids can (thought it fitting) but I was at the store and saw Altoids smalls... The can looked like it was the right size, so I bought one and brought it home. I'm pretty generous with them so it doesn't take me long to go through them. Before I knew it I had it cleaned out and was trying to fit the bus pirate in... and it didn't fit. 

 So not wanting to start over, and being SO close.. I picked up my trusty dremmel and started shaving off the corners, being careful not to shave off anything important... A few minutes and an annoyed wife later it fit snugly in the tin. (protip: the wife doesn't like you grinding pcb board in the dining room)

 After finishing with the board, I marked where the holes for the I/O cable and the USB cable were. I don't have some fancy calipers or anything... I have a jusabout. That hole goes jusabout here... this hole goes jusabout there... another dremmeling and I have two new holes... the holes aren't perfect but neither am I. Just ask my wife... (another ProTip: if your not allowed to grind PCB in the dining room, you probably aren't supposed to cut metal either, so make sure the wife isn't home.)

So to keep it from shorting out I added some electrical tape. I'd like to put in some tiny holes and use some hotglue and perhaps even some fiberoptic wire I have somewhere to make light pipes for the status lights, but this works so far. It's much more compact, fits in the box I keep it in better. Now to find things to use it on... MUAHAHAHHAHHAAA!

E Lighter

My inlaws have become excited with this 'E-Cigarette' as I fully intend to take one apart, and re-engineer it for my own nefarious dealings, I associated it in my mind with my wife's new obsession.. LED candles. The Flicker LED candle if you take it apart seems to just be an LED, a switch and a battery. If that were the case then the light would come on and off and that's it. really though embedded in the led (supposedly) is an IC chip (or there was a troll in the forum I read this in. It seems plausible and the LED isn't going to flicker on its own, so I'm just going to push the 'I believe' button and go on. The first thing I did was to Steal acquire one of the Wife's flame-less candles and sacrifice it to the maker god Haxor.

The brand I'm using is normally acquired around Halloween and I got six for like a buck fifty so if one catches fire I'm not concerned. I opened it up and took out the components, but I was going to need a battery holder.
I solved this very simply, I cut out the existing battery holder, trimmed the excess got in trouble with the wife for having orange plastic shavings all over the dining room and VOLIA! a battery holder. Next I needed a Lighter... Preferably a Felix Lighter, but I Zippo will suffice.

So I sent a shout out to Facebook, asking if anyone had an old zippo they didn't want anymore. Making sure that they knew it wasn't going to work anymore as a zippo... FB came through and after a trip to the bank I had a free zippo lighter. Taking it apart was a breeze, but modifying it wasn't. I ran into a serious problem.

Fortune smiled on me and for Christmas I got a my first Dremmel tool.. (how did I live this long without it) You see the flint tube is a brass tube that goes from the bottom (where the screw thing is to put flints in) to the wheel passing through the metal inside where you keep the cotton for the fuel. Just accept that it is glued in there, and I made short work of cutting/breaking the tube out. Much to the dismay of the wife who seemed overly concerned with the amount of brass shavings in the dining room. The emblem is just glued on, I took it off and will probably throw it at that Pontiac that cuts me off every morning on my way to work.



Now I have the basic form of what I want. Now I need to somehow integrate a switch into this in a way that is intuitive. Normally one flicks the wheel with the thumb wheel being steel, and it strikes the flint bla bla bla. So I decided to use the wheel to move the switch, I have a hole there anyway so the switch should mount underneath and moving the wheel back and forth will turn the system on and off (which is what I want) I was hoping for a solution like this but wasn't going to hold my breath till I was at this point /sigh of relief.
Now to get into a groove


I decided to do this part while the wife wasn't home. Sparks are pretty, but I know she would be worried about the small fire that ensues. I'd like to take a moment to say that it's easier (IMHO) to REMOVE steel than to PUT IT BACK. I chose to err on the side of caution and only remove a little at a time. Then I would try the switch, see where I needed to cut more, then (oddly enough) cut more. Also I didn't cut for very long at a time. Heating the metal too much is bad for it, I didn't see a need to be mean to the metal, so I wasn't. So the Notch is cut, the hole for the switch is there there is a hole for an LED, and plenty of room inside for a battery. It seems like this may be successful. Riddle me this though... how am I going to keep from unwanted grounding on the inside? The answer.. spray on tape... I hope.


So if you just spray on spray on tape, then you have a big black mess. I opted to tape off what I didn't want black and insulated and sprayed on the inside resulting in a big black mess. Hind sight being what it is, Masking tape is probably better to mask things off with, and I probbally shouldn't hold the nozzle so close to the work area... but really I should have offered to pay a ten year old to do it, then gotten mad at him for the mess, refused to pay and sent him home. the result would have been the same, but I could have blamed it all on him. However, some spray on tape, twenty minutes of scrubbing my hands listening to the wife tell me how I should have done it, and it is currently drying on the dining room table.

So while that dries and cures, I have to find something else to occupy my attention...