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New Intro Video!

A project log for Stylish!

A most stylish wearable music synthesizer! A real stylus based monophonic music synthesizer built into a giant trucker belt buckle!

t-b-trzepaczT. B. Trzepacz 10/08/2018 at 15:280 Comments

I finally recorded the new intro video for Stylish! This one should fulfill all of the requirements for the Hackaday Prize (which the previous video did as well) and the "Tindie Project to Product Program". 

This video appears only as the result of a full night of hacking to get the thing to be presentable.

First, the inside of the 3d printed case was Dremel'd out to give more room for the PCB so that the enclosure would have a better chance of actually closing. 

Some holes were drilled in the bottom of the case so that the USB and debugging lines could get out. One of these cracked the plastic and left an oversized hole that I covered with blue tape for the show.

I was really having trouble getting the case to stay shut, so I designed a part to cover the seam, and printed it out of TPE (aka Ninja-flex) to cover the gap. It worked, but it didn't hold the thing together, so I had to add some clear tape to keep it all from falling apart. In the process of adding the tape, I lost the TPE ring, and so it didn't show up in the video. I found it immediately after uploading the video.


I made a new stylus by hollowing out an old permanent marker and adding a tip from a 1/4" to RCA adapter that had broken in half. I used the soldering iron to heat the tip and push it into the plastic, and then to smooth out the plastic afterwards. I soldered a foot long piece of stranded speaker wire to it, which was threaded through the pen body. The pen body and tip had all of the felt removed and once everything was installed I filled it with silicone RTV to seal things up and give it a little weight.

I dug around in my storage until I found an old fashioned banana plug and socket to attach to the case for the stylus to plug into, allowing the stylus to be removed. I am a 3rd generation electrical engineer, and have the accumulated junk^h^h^h^h technical wealth of that I have inherited from my late father and grandfather to dig through, so I can almost always find what I need if I look hard enough. I used the soldering iron to melt a hole through the case and screwed in the socket for the banana plug there, taking care to make sure the plug was not at such an angle as to cause the case to ride up. But then it was discovered that the back of the plug was hitting the speaker mount, so the back of the speaker mount was clipped off. That caused the speaker to immediately fall out, so I taped it in with some clear tape. I'm not proud... ya do what ya gots ta do!

Then, solder joints were repaired on the board to get the LEDs working again, fix a stuck key, and the new lead for the stylus, which was attached to the banana plug socket with a proper crimped wire contact and everything! Having fixed all of this, the holes for the USB and debugging weren't necessary any more, and I was able to attach the batteries.

I knew I wasn't going to have the final belt mount ready, but I wanted to have something that would work, so I dug around and found the perfect thing!

I clipped out the spacers for cables in the middle of the medium sized clips, and super-glue'd them to the back.

At this moment, I just realized that there is an issue with the video, and so I have to re-upload it. But a TON of progress was made tonight/this morning, even if it was mostly dog-and-pony stuff that won't be reused, it makes it easier to show the thing off.

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