Handgun Bluetooth Earpiece Project

Photo by Curtis Thompson

Last week, the Open API group that I've been working with at Best Buy had a hack day. It was phenomenal. Gone were our computer screens and in their places appeared soldering irons, arduinos, robots, drawdios, LEDs, tweet-a-watts, ping pong balls, Legos and even a professional lock-picking course.

Any of you who know me well enough know that I hate talking on the telephone. I really, really, really hate it. Inspired by the Retro Wireless Handset project from Make Vol. 20, I decided to mod a Bluetooth earpiece for my phone out of a kids plastic toy gun. Now, I look forward to receiving a call from the First Lady while I'm at work. I draw the gun out of my pocket, stick the barrel in my ear (the speaker is in the business end), and pull the trigger to answer the call.

Below is a larger photo of the guts (in charging mode with the cable attached). It still needs a bit of work to flush mount the microphone and I've been debating on painting it to look like a real gun. (I get equally giddy and frightened by the panic that this could cause should someone not notice that the gun is a fake or should I accidentally take a call while at the bank.) But you can see how perfectly the trigger and switch work together on this model of toy gun.