Introduction: ShowerPhones

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About: Lithium Rain is absolutely not to be trifled with when it comes to building insane and useless things. She prides herself on being able to eat more churros than your average horse. She is not a toaster. She i…

I am hopelessly addicted to my mp3 player. Pretty much all day long I listen to music, audiobooks, MIT lectures (new science crush: Jeremy Wolfe) , podcasts, radio shows, and the like.

You might express my listening habits by saying:

IF Lithium Rain ! = = asleep THEN Headphones_are_on

And sometimes Headphones_are_on even if Lithium Rain ! = = awake ;)

So obviously it was very vexing to have to take off my earbuds and stop listening to my favorite radio show or my rockin' tunes every morning to take a shower. I get very bored while shaving and shampooing, all I can think is IwishIwishIwishIwishIwishIhadmyzune and on the whole it's not a particularly agreeable way to start the day, bereft of glorious melodies. I tried traditional shower radios, but they eat batteries like crazy, the sound is very tinny, and if you turn it up loud enough to hear over the water other people don't always appreciate it. Thus, the ShowerPhones were born!

(I tried entering this as a slideshow but it wouldn't let me, so it's kind of a hybrid-mutant instructable-after-the-fact / slideshow thing =] )

Step 1: If I Did It

This was my very first soldering job that turned out well, I'm kinda proud of it. =]
I wanted a long cord so I could move around freely, so I cut the jack off the end of a cheap pair of headphones and soldered on an extension from an old audio in cable.

Then I wrapped all the connections in electrical tape once I figured out that the wires were shorting one another out when they touched, and shrinkwrapped around the joint so it would be waterproof.

To waterproof the headphones, I took ziplock bags and made little pouches all around the ear bits. Then I took a lighter and melted the seams together all along the edge, and sealed the top and the bottom really well with, again, electrical tape. Don't breathe the smoke that results from this...

Step 2: Okay Okay I Confess...I Did It...

Finally, I took an old peanut butter jar and made a hole in the bottom and inserted the jack and a length of cord (so I could conveniently position the mp3 player without a lot of hassle). The question of how to attach it to the shower was rather unelegantly solved by using a quantity of putty, inasmuch as I had no suction cups or well-designed shelves in my shower, and did not want to use a wire rack that fit over the showerhead. The putty is totally waterproof, but slides downward over time and is goopy and dripping and messy - I really recommend using something else if you can.

The entire set-up works unexpectedly well - I've used this for a couple of months now, and not a drop of water gets in the peanut butter jar with teh music inside, and while a little bit of water has leaked inside the plastic around the headphones, it hasn't done anything bad yet, and seems to kind of drain out if left to its own devices for a little while.

It's not very pretty, but it's very functional, and I've been quite pleased with it.

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