Quick hack of phone case to add bigger battery

Here's a few pics of an enjoyable hack up of a case for a bigger battery I bought for my phone. This one has twice the capacity of the standard battery, but is thicker. What a great excuse to hack together a case for it.

This beauty is half cheapy bought case and half sliced up old ice-cream container...

Here's the battery getting measured out. This was to get a hole cut to allow the extra thickness to protrude



mmm... diamond encrusted cutting wheels... I love my Dremel.


35,000 rpm - cutting out the panel in the shop bought case
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Next - cutting out a slightly bigger piece of plastic from a black ice cream container


The edges of this were shaped by gentle heating to soften the plastic then forming over a hard edge held in a vice. To heat, a standard cigarette lighter was used



Once completed, this was glued on with the trusty glue gun...


et voila!

Making a restricted-key data input by physically hacking up a keyboard

Hive-mind Fortune-reader

This is roughly what the keyboard will look like on the fortune teller machine. It is needed to allow people to enter their twitter name. It's neat, but not really quite the ideal look. It could quite happily benefit from being steampunked or even just fairground-punked or something. If time allowed, I might have carved wooden keys. Actually maybe, Bakelite..

Hey ho, in the meantime it delivers the necessary, even if a little un-designed.


On the other hand, the good thing about testing these possibilities is that you get to hack through plastic in a generally therapeutic way...

Before and after...















To start with, first unscrew everything, to reveal the innards...















The key mechanism is great...















Hacking off the end of the board eighteenth-century-ship style - with a saw, then planimg it down - so enjoyable!















This looked pretty neat in the spring...


But underneath all that, there's a rather sensitive set of plastic circuit matrices. These capture the physical presses of keys and make the corresponding electronic connections


Sadly, I managed to kill the first board by some rather unsubtle trimming (subtltey is not really my thing), so take two was rather more careful. Trim the plastic and just fold the silicone and printed acetate key-press sheets...















There are two sheets of contacts, separated by a masking sheet. The top sheet has a matrix of electrodes which can connect to corresponding contacts on the bottom sheet. In the middle, the masking sheet has holes that control which contacts can touch. Before folding the sheets, the contacts for any keys that need to be neutralised (like CTRL or WINDOWS or ALT) need to be prevented from touching, and therefore activating anything undesirable!

What you can't really see here is the sellotape used to do this. This was applied accross the sheets to mask the contacts. This needed some filigree-level scalpel work to cut round the screw fittings...



This is the orignal gaffer tape attempt which was too crude...















Eventually though, the second attempt worked and the cut down keyboard finally worked..
















This works, but I still want to individually re-create each key...

Turning a "munny" into a USB cable extension socket - Part 2

This little beauty is a pimped version of an air-drying clay model munny my daughter made, but discarded.




It has been operated on, to insert a USB extension lead, so that when I get things off a USB memory stick into the computer, I can use this instead of finding the USB port on the PC - Much more enjoyable!

















The USB socket was stuck in the mouth, threaded through a hole throught the body (see previous post).

Having been repaired with builder's grab adhesive, the mough was filed and sanded to restore the original shape of the head.









The original model had slumped during drying, and was not stable.

It's centre of gravity was too far back, making it fall over backwards easily. To make it stable, a tail was built. A splint was added by screwing a galvanised wood screw into the model





More grab adhesive was packed round the screw and a tail modelled up around it

This was left to dry hard. This took about a week. The surface dries in a day, and although it can then be painted, the underlying adhesive is still plastic. This means it can easily be distorted during handling.

Once dry, it was filed and sanded as the mouth had been above.

Note, the model's right ear (on the left looking at it) had been damaged beyond repair and was deliberately left as a scar.




Once sanded, it was then wiped down to remove filing dust, then repainted back to its original scheme.  (left)

The black details were then reapplied using permanent marker pen (right)

Turning a "munny" into a USB cable extension socket

This is a hack job on one of my daughter's models. She has rejected it, but it's too lovely to discard, so here it is half way through being turned into a USB extension lead socket - an unnecessarily OTT socket maybe, but certainly more fun than a dull black plastic housing...

The mouth has been built up using grab adhesive, widely used in building to attach cladding, etc.. This is a surprisingly good modelling material: workable, but fast drying and hard when set




Working backwards here, before the final mouth remodelling above, the USB socket had to be fitted to the existing model.


This is a normal extension lead, placed into a cavity hacked out of the mouth, then glued in place with hot glue











The hack job to put the hole in the face is on the left.

the feed hole to get the cable in from below is on the right







here's the cable and original model before surgery!!