Staples that was easy button hack

I expect this project to take a lot of abuse at Maker Faire, so I applied a liberal amount of hot glue inside to hold the wires down and out of the path of the springs, switch, case, and the likely path of the button dome. It looks identical to three other tap lights. I just love that I was able to make use of the battery holder and existing switch inside the project.

The 4. Even so, this is an incredibly cost-effective project enclosure. Underneath the upper bracket is the bottom portion of the button, which holds the batteries, weights, and speaker.

At this point the button is completely disassembled. The circuit board, like the rest of the button, is very basic. It only has an audio chip, an SMD capacitor, an SMD resistor, a membrane button, and the pads for power and the speaker. But what we can do is re-purpose the button portion of the PCB. This seems awfully wasteful — why not re-use the already working circuit board?

The first step is to desolder the power and speaker leads. These are your two contact points for the button. In the highlighted image above, these pads are shown in red. Lastly, take a sharp craft knife and make two cuts across the traces running to the audio chip: one above your first soldered pad, and one to the right of the capacitor. This will prevent the audio chip from interfering with the button circuit. In the highlighted image, these are the yellow lines.

Give it a try: using a multimeter or a microcontroller, see if you can detect a button press when you depress the button membrane. For a repurposed button it may not be enough to pick up the button signal. With some projects, you will also want to embed a microcontroller inside of the button casing.

In my opinion, the easiest place to do this is where the speaker sits. Adafruit Trinket 5V, sitting on a 3D printed bracket. The first time I put this together, I used an Adafruit Trinket.

But many microcontrollers can fit:. But, this was a HowTo on how to do this the more expensive and harder way, however fun. A fun video, to say the least. Sincerley, Alex1inferno- The Critic.

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