The modern day brick project

I've had a dream for a long time. Looking back to my childhood years, watching Saved by the bell in the mornings, Zachs mobile phone was so amazing! When i grew up a bit, and got my first mobile, it just wasn't the same. Oh yeah, i could play snake and change the covers on my phone, but it just wasnt the same as having a zach style brick phone!

A few years passed and mobiles changed. We suddenly have phones capable of video calls and taking random pics when you're drunk. So i set it my task to recreate yesteryear and buy a brick phone! :D

A quick search on ebay left me with nothing. I was searching for the model number of what i wanted. A motorola 8800 mobile phone. I then decided to change my tactics, and a quick search for "motorola brick phone" left me with many options. I quickly snapped up a nice spangly 8800x for 26 of her majesties pounds.

So i now had my old stlye phone coming to me in the post. Now i think its time for a quick science lesson. These old phones used analogue networks. Since we are now in the digital age, they just wouldn't be compatible with todays networks. So i'd need to modify the phone to work on the digital networks. The easiest way by far is to just cut up the phone, take out the insides and slap a smaller newer phone in the casing! Fortunatly for me, i had two ericsson T66 phones lying around wanting to be used :P



Upon recieving the brick, a plan of action was laid out. This was as follows:
1. Take phones apart
2. Poke around wiring stuff up hoping it works.
Simple really.

The first task was really how i was gonna have the t66 in the 8800 and still be able to talk. We needed to wire up the exisisting microphone and speaker from the 8800x so they would be in the right posistion:



First we wired up the speaker from the 8800x to the speaker from the t66, this would be by far the easiest method to get it working. After getting some speaker cable connected to the old speaker, we thought we'd test the speaker before going any further. I'm sure theres some proper methods for doing this, but we just wired it into the stereo, set the volume to low, and put a streets CD on. We have later been informed that this should have blown the speaker, but it still works :P



The next stage was soldering the old speaker to the new, which was then tested with a shady stuck together phone:



Amazingly it worked, and produced this sound when you pressed a number key.
We later decided against wiring up the microphone, it'll be much much easier to use the exisiting one all taped up like this:



The next few processes involved a lot of dremeling the middle bit of the phone out and sticking the t66 into place. I was gonna make a faceplate with button holes, but decided that that would be way to much work, and then thought i should just spray the phones black and put the t66 in the place of a hole on the 8800x :)

After a few coats of paint, and sticking the t66 into the 8800x, its just about done.

Due to me hardly taking any production photos, i'll just post the nearly complete ones here:

Left to do:

1. Insert charging thinghy (c'mon graham)
2. Make it look a bit prettier by sorting out the messy dremeling job :P
3. Stand around and get photos of peoples faces :)