Expanded Vocabulary Easy Button

The Easy Button is available from Staples for $5 and it simply says "that was easy" every time you smack it. The easy button is well constructed for the price, but requires a little work and about $10 worth of parts to make it recordable.

Step 1 Get your parts

I chose to use the ISD1600B voice recorder chip and essentially build the reference circuit for it. I made sure to get a microphone that had good low frequency response since the speaker in this thing is so big and can reproduce low frequency voices well.

You will need [digikey part numbers in brackets]:
(1) Easy Button
(1) ISD1610 Voice recorder [ISD1610BSY-ND]
(1) Electret microphone [P9925-ND]
(1) Pushbutton [EG1826-ND]
(1) 1k Resistor [1.00KdXBK-ND]
(1) 80.6k Resistor [80.6KXBK-ND]
(3) 4.75k Resistor [4.75KXBK-ND]
(5) 0.1uF Ceramic capacitor [BC1101CT-ND]
(5) 4.7uF Caramic capacitor [445-2854-ND]

You will also need these supplies:
Wire (I used 24 AWG stranded and 30 AWG solid)
Glue (I used 5 minute epoxy)
Solder

And these tools:
Soldering iron
Wire cutter/stripper
Tweezers

Comments

[jpstaub]

Great hack. I did the same thing but with the guts from a recordable card from Hallmark. It has all the bits on a PC board. The only challenge in fitting it all inside the button. 

[degroof]

I tried using the SOIC chip but it was a bit too small for me solder, even with a magnifier. I ended up cramming an ISD1620 demo board (DigiKey I16-COB20-ND) in instead. Wasn't enough room for both it and the spring, though. Still works pretty well.

[cmrc]

I used the demo board and fashioned a new spring out of the spiral wire off the back of an old notebook. It worked well. All it took was removing some of the plastic that was getting in the way, and mounting the spring in such a way that it did not interfere with pushing the button down.

[akatsuki666]

umm can ur little chip download stuff off the computer? if not pls tell me one that can ty

[instain]

No, it cannot. Not directly anyway. You can hold the microphone up to your speakers and it records pretty well.

[cyrozap]

a video of it would be cool.

[cflowers]

Awesome hack! I featured it on The Daily Hack. Keep hacking, modding and building! :)

Charlie Flowers
twitter.com/charlie

[inventorjack]

Awesome little project. I just happen to have one of those ISD chips laying around, and one of my coworkers has an Easy button at work. When he comes back next week, it will have a new vocabulary :)

[jeff-o]

Now that is some crazy "squished bug" soldering!