How To End Bike Theft: The Honeybike Project

Step 3 Connect Leads To Vibrator Motor

Connecting 2 wires to the 2 leads on the vibrator motor is waaaayyyyy more difficult than I anticipated. Try it yourself and then let me know whether this is more incompetence on my part or legitimate difficulty. But be forewarned: I broke one phone and spent over 6 hours trying to get this element just right.

Some things I did figure out:
-remove the back of the phone along with the battery and sim card. after you unscrew the 6 weird screws and pop out the cover to the usb port, the front of the phone will come off as well w/ a little force along the edges.
-the keypad assembly contains the vibrating motor and can be disconnected from the rest of the phone. if you're looking down at the keypad, force it upwards on the right side and it'll pop out a snap-on connector. flip up the ribbon cable connector on the other side and that'll pop off, too; my note on the picture below should make this a little more understandable.
-the ribbon cable that runs to the vibrating motor and speaker can also be disconnected. yeah, this took me forever to figure out:)

In the end, I used a flat ribbon cable from a dismantled cdrom drive just wedged and taped into place. When this broke, I switched to 2 wires from an ide cable and soldered the more accessible of the 2 while wedging in the other. We'll see how long this lasts:)

You know you've got this wired correctly when you get a brief reading for voltage / amperage on your multimeter when you make the phone vibrate and connect the multimeter leads to the 2 wires from the vibrator motor.