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May 12, 2008
Emergency Party Button
UPDATE: The three people I've talked to about this were all not really into it. But I don't care. Me, I'm still really fucking impressed. And as someone not from the suburbs, I really like the suburban-looking house in this context. I like the thought of some dude commuting home to some boring looking house in the middle of some anywhere, usa cul-de-sac and geeking out on his Emergency Party Button project. And then having all his friends (who definitely DON'T dance and DON'T "party") come over to see this weird thing he's done and listen to Haddaway for a couple of minutes and do a timid little fingers-pointin half-dance and then smile sheepishly. ("Geez, Josh. This is pretty cool.") See, I like that part of it.
Awesome. Totally awesome. Instant YouTube classic. I predict that by the end of the week, even your mom will have seen this nobody will care about this except me and some nerds who are into building their own circuits.
It's worth checking out the details afterwards:
The most important thing to me in this project was that of aesthetics. The button itself had to look good, no, amazing. The entire effect would be nothing more than lights turning on and off if the button wasn't as good as it needed to be. I started looking for the button first. You would be surprised at how hard it is to find a button. I checked the local electronics warehouse to no avail. The closest thing they had were the buttons that you find on arcade game machines. Useless to me (well, at least for this project, hint hint).
After about a week of solid searching, I finally found a website that deals in industrial automation (think factories). I found the perfect button. It was a mushroom-style button with a nice looking bezel. Only problem... it was expensive as hell for just a button. But I had to do what I had to do and finally ordered it. After a week or so of doing nothing, the button finally came. After I got the button in the mail, the rest is history.
Posted by caps at May 12, 2008 01:37 PM