7210 Radio kit modification

[stigweed]

This isn't exactly a computer mod. It had three reasons for xoming into existance:

1) My ex girlfriend's kitten chewed through one of the earphones on my Nokia 7210 hands free kit (the phone has an fm radio built in and you need the kit to work it, so I was down to one speaker). That's not the reason we broke up, btw.

2) I had no radio at uni and prefer travelling light and don't want to take a hifi back there with me. I always use my Creative 2.1 system and whichever computer.

3) It was a hot summer day, having exhausted a few hours of Quake and watched Aliens SE, I decided it was time to get in the sun and so some ...soldering, naturally.

So I decided to put a stereo jack on the hands free kit so I could plug it into my line in and route it through my pc/laptop and into my 2.1 system.

Here's what the initial kit looked like. I had to destroy the clamshell around the mic part. The screws just wouldn't undo.

[stigweed]

I cannibalised a pair of panasonic headphones i don;t use so that I could attach a 3.5mm stereo jack to it. I guessed that the two strands that were the same colour represented the neutral terminal (the circuit board on the mic/button thingy had nice labels for LP,LN,RP,RN (I gues Left-pos, left-neutral, etc). Made a note of which headphone was which!

Soldering was a b1tch because of the ancient soldering iron my Dad had. Would have been more accurate using the flat part of a clothes iron. In the end it was done.

Carved the housing out of an empty puncture repair kit.

[stigweed]

Used masking tape to close the box after checking that it was working nicely. Had a couple of holes carved below the line of the lid to allowed the wires to come through without getting pinched. Also tied knots in the wires on the inside of the box so that if they were pulled to much from the outside, the knots would take the strain and not the solder (a trick I learned in disassembling/destroying the headphones).

Final picture is the item in action.

I guess now I can record my calls. The mic and the button on the circuit board (button answers calls or cycles through preset stations on the phone) are still functional and in tact but the casing was screwed so I couldn't be bothered to build a new one. I'll never use it for hands free anyway; phone starts ringing, unplug and pick up.