Wow look at that! It appears to be a fully working cheap plastic faux rotary wall-mount phone that someone gave me as a gift!

Wait, faux rotary? What's the point? I know; I'll fix the phone!

Here is the same phone again in exploded view, and by "exploded", I mean I took it apart looking for usable components for other projects. The ringer might be useful, and there is a switch that can probably be used for something.

In reality, I just want the receiver.

Because the phone is so new, the speaker and microphone have very little power requirements and can easily be used with a computer. I thought there was a problem with the mic, so I broke the phone open and replaced the mic with a cheap computer mic.

why everything was glued together in a phone that was designed to be taken apart is beyond me.

After a little solder/hot glue/electrical tape magic, I had the receiver wired up for standard microphone and headphone jacks. It may not be pretty, but it is pretty functional and that's what counts.

Hey, not bad.

Now all I need to do is plug this thing into my computer and I can start making internet phone calls to um... uh.... someone on the internet?

Now quit reading, and take a perfectly good "something" and repurpose it.

If I've learned anything from spending a month focusing on writing a 100 page movie script, it is that time is precious and it should be spent doing things that one loves. That being said, I *don't* like cleaning my apartment; if I have the time to clean, then I have time to do something fun or at least something more interesting than pushing a vacuum cleaner.

Well eventually it was time to clean, and during the cleaning quite a bit of loose change was found. To keep the change in one place, I put it all into the cylinder that previously housed the scotch that my buddy gave me for helping him with his photography projects. Do you notice how there is no link to his photography blog? That's because he doesn't have one.

When I put change into the cylinder, I waste a lot of time taking the lid off, depositing the change, and then returning the lid. There must be an easier way......

I had big dreams of using my rotary-tool to cut a nice slot in the lid of cylinder, but that wouldn't be a good use of time. A pocket knife, hammer, and some files should do the trick.

In case you were wondering, that is $44.12 in change.

First things first, hammer the knife blade through the lid. Kids, don't try this at home.

Click the image and look at the big picture. See that notch on the knife edge? My buddy Caleb did that while hotwiring my 68 Plymouth.

The newly created slot in the lid was widened and the edges were folded and hammered flat to reduce the exposure of sharp edges.

Can't touch this. do do de do Can't touch this. Stop. Hammertime!

Done, done, and done.

The lid was put back on the cylinder and the project was finished.

For perspective, I have included a ¢50 piece, a dollar coin, and a quarter.

Now what the hell am I going to do with the change that I collect? Actually, I have somewhat of an idea, but I'll save that for a future post.

Now quit reading, and go spend your time wisely unless you *want* to spend your time reading, which I find to be a very worthwhile endeavor.

Now that the rotory dialer input device is finished, I thought it would be a good time to make a video of the device in action. After a few delayed starts and poor lighting, I had some semi-decent footage of phone, but now what?

The previous video I created to show off a switch interface was edited using kino, which is a nice video editor with great support for capturing digital video off of a camera attached via a firewire cable. This time around, I used kdenlive to edit my video because kdenlive has a few different features that will help speed up my editing time. ( I still used kino to grab the video off of my camera)

With the video edited, It was time to upload to a host. Typically, I would use youtube for this sort of thing ( just because I use a tripod, it doesn't mean I can't use youtube) , but since I wanted to see if I could integrate the HTML5 Video tag into a web page, the video was uploaded to youtube and tinyvid.tv: a host for theora video. By getting creative with the "video" tag, I should be able to show the Theora video to those using browsers that support the Video tag, and everyone else will see the flash video.


If your feed reader isn't displaying the video, it can be viewed directly on tinyvid as well as on youtube.


In hind sight, I probably should have shown the phone doing more visual stuff on the computer screen. When the system is set up to play and control audio, it makes for a very boring video experience.

now go make something.

About a year ago, while walking through a large parking garage downtown, I spied a brass table lamp in a trash can. Knowing that most lamp problems are caused by a faulty bulb or a loose connection in the wiring, I decided to take the lamp home and fix it up. Hey, let's face it, nothing says "captain fancy pants" like a brass table lamp. Actually, being a captain and wearing some fancy pants would also be a captain fancy pants indicator.

Anyway, about 2 months ago I finally decided it was time to fix the lamp so I performed the first step in debugging a broken lamp: I plugged the lamp in and flipped the switch. Oh, well what do you know? The lamp was working perfectly... or was it? The 60 watt T-10 bulb in the lamp did seem a little too dim for my tastes and um... if the lamp is going to be on my computer desk, shouldn't it get it's power from the USB port on my computer? OK so I was just looking for an excuse to convert the lamp to LEDs powered by USB. Lets get on with it, shall we?

Step 1: buy supplies (more on that later)
Step 2: take the lamp apart
Now I've been taking things apart since I was able to pick up a screwdriver and let me tell you, lamps are easy to take apart. For the most part, a lamp is a hollow tube with some do-dads and space filler-uppers all held together with a few bolts. A twist here and twist there....and bam, you have a pile of junk. Taking the lamp apart allowed me to replace the old heavy gauge lamp wires with narrower colored wires. Since LEDs only let electricity flow in one direction, using colored wires is a good way to keep track of positive and negative electron flow. I used red for positive and black for negative.

The nice twisty switch for the lamp was a part of the bulb socket, and since I didn't want to get a new switch, I decided to just mangle the socket and make it work. I had previously purchased a bunch of 5mm white LEDs from the Hack-N-Mod Store for wicked cheap and I took a trip to my local bulk electronics supplier for some 91 Ohm resistors. the LEDs had a fairly tight light spread so I gently filed the entire surface of the LED, which I find helps diffuse the spread the light quite a bit.

Slicing and hot-gluing a Dr. Bronner's soap container gave me a nice platform onto which I could adhere my LEDs and resistors.

Keep it clean! use Dr Bronner's Magic "All-One" soap. I prefer the peppermint.

Here is the finished circuit of LEDs and resistors glued to the Bronner platform. Since my digital camera was "Top of the Line" 10 years ago, it doesn't exactly take the best pictures. Well, actually, it is my fault for not putting the camera on the macro setting. Anyway, the circuit was designed using the LED calculator at the LED center. I could have used a lower Ohm resistor and my lamp would have been brighter... maybe next time. Basically, the circuit is 5 LEDs in parallel, each with it's own 91 Ohm resistor.

This is the wiring at the base of the lamp. The positive wire from the USB cable is connected to my red replacement lamp wire and the USB ground is connected to my black replacement lamp wire. Fancy that.

There is a cover that screws on over these wires but I decided not to include a picture of it because I already have enough crappy pictures in this post.

My heart sank when I plugged in the lamp, turned the switch and nothing happened. sigh. It took about 15 seconds with a voltmeter to find the loose connection near the switch.

CLICK
Let there be light; the lamp in it's natural environment.

My keyboard, in the dark, in all of it's USB powered LED illuminated glory. Oh scary. Not bad for 5 volts.

When the lamp was finally completed, I celebrated by cleaning my computer desk and then sticking a bunch of glow in the dark stars and planets to my wall.