MightyOhm

Woot is selling a Samsung Bluetooth headset for $17.99 + $5 S/H – $20 MIR = $3 after rebate.

For that price this headset could be a great candidate to use for a DIY Retro Bluetooth Handset.

The catch is that I can’t guarantee this headset is actually hackable until someone buys one and reports back here.

Who will be the first?

In this week’s Make: Weekend Project, KipKay shows us how to turn a Bluetooth headset into a retro-styled wireless handset.

This project is based on the ‘Retro Wireless Handset’ article I wrote for Make: magazine volume 20.

KipKay also posted a pdf version of the article so now you can read about this project even if you’re not a Make: subscriber.

Enjoy!

This weekend I hosted a post-Halloween kit building party at MightyOhm HQ.

Nine close friends built Conway’s Game of Life kits from Adafruit Industries.  This is my favorite kit for these kinds of workshops because it’s easy for beginners to complete in about 2 hours, and when everyone is done, you can wire all of the kits together to create one large cellular automata display.  The last time I helped people build this kit was at a Make:SF workshop at the TechShop in Menlo Park.

Here’s a timelapse video of the afternoon, shot with a Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro webcam on an Eee PC 4G running Booru Webcam 2.0.

The capture interval was 5 seconds.  I used Quicktime Pro to stitch the images together at 15fps and iMovie to add titles and music (Turbo Outrun by FRP from remix.kwed.org.)

I wore my Halloween costume for most of the afternoon.  What am I?  Most people on the streets of San Francisco had no idea…

Safety first!

Stuart was the first to finish his kit:

Soldering the kits together to form the matrix:

Nine happy kit-builders with the 3×3 matrix they created with their finished kits:

And lastly, a video of the 3×3 matrix in action:

Three people had little to no soldering experience at the beginning of the afternoon.  Everyone who came went home with a working kit.  Success!

Volume 20 of Make: magazine, which hits newsstands on November 15th, includes an article I wrote about DIY Telephony titled “Retro Wireless Handset.”

The article is based on my Bluetooth Handset Hack and includes additional illustrations and step by step instructions to help you build one of your own.

If you are a Make: subscriber, you can read the article via your digital edition subscription.  Non-subscribers should be able to click here for a sneak preview.

Make: is the one magazine I look forward to the most throughout the year.  I am very excited to be a part of Make: and hope to contribute again in the future.

Sadly, the Maker Faire is over – but it was totally awesome!  Kylie, Tony and I gave out hundreds of moo cards and stickers, met lots of Makers, and spread the word about my DIY wireless streaming internet radio project.

Here’s a pic of me and Tony during the second day of the Faire.  Tony built the awesome wooden enclosure for the project.  Last week, he decided to come up from Los Angeles at the last minute to see what the Maker Faire is all about.  Based on the grin he had all weekend, I’m pretty sure he’ll be back next year.

My project won an Editor’s Choice ribbon!  Here’s a very happy me with Phil Torrone and Limor Fried of Make/Adafruit Industries:

I took lots of photos!  Check em out.