A couple months ago, I hacked my Staples Easy Button and did some simple circuit bending. I mainly wanted to get my feet wet and it was a really simple device to experiment with. Well, I’ve gotten several inquiries about changing the button’s audio and my response is normally, “It shouldn’t be too difficult…” It turned out to not be. I’ve managed to hack the Easy Button with a recordable device that allows the owner to change the recording at will. It uses the Easy Button’s button switch and speaker. However, it doesn’t use the EB’s batteries. Here’s a video displaying how it works now.

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First, I opened the Easy Button and removed the wires connecting to the battery comparment and the wires going to the speaker. Learning from my mistakes on the last button I now know that you can remove the little black rubber feet and remove the screws to cleanly take the button apart. You can also remove whatever electronic bits are there on the circuit board except for the rubber switch.

There’s another component you’ll need. I’m using a keychain from Radio Shack. It has a timer, light and voice memo recorder. It’s that last part that we’re interested in. In fact, if you can find a smaller voice recorder out there with a simpler circuit board, that might be a better bet. This is the best I could do though. It does record up to 20 seconds and has a simple switch for recording and a switch for playback. That’s what we need. I’d leave the white LED attached for now as it’s a good simple test to make sure the batteries are making good contact. You can tape them to the board later, but you need to solder some joints first.

In the back of the keychain is a door that hides the batteries. Take that off and remove the batteries. From there you can take out the two screws that hold the front to the back. We’re going to be throwing away a lot of the keychain at this point. However, be careful not to break anything. I couldn’t get the LED out and I wanted to use the big EB speaker, but you need to save as much of those wires as possible. I fried the circuit board in one of these because I don’t know much about soldering. Unless you’re totally comfortable soldering on a little IC board, do what I did and solder to the wires when possible. I’m using a new small LED (it will show you that you’re recording) and you should be able to pop out and salvage the microphone with some careful prying.

I attached a momentary switch to the contacts that trigger the RECORD function. This, along with the mic and the new LED come through holes I’ve drilled through the battery compartment.

You’ll want to wire the contacts for the memo recorder PLAY switch to either side of the rubber switch on the Easy Button IC board. There are a couple good places to solder. You can see here which ones I’ve chosen.

On the Memo Recorder IC board, you can now tape down the batteries. You could also use a rubber band or epoxy, but you may want to replace them later, so don’t get too messy. Maybe hot glue would be a good solution? If you’re using a rubber band, don’t let it get too bulky or it won’t fit under the EB circuit board. Once everything is soldered and tested, you need to take out some of the plastic inside the EB housing. This is so you can get all the stuff to fit inside. I used my soldering iron to melt away the problem plastic walls. Don’t melt any screw columns and try to keep the metal button clicker from shorting your solder points. Electrical tape or rubber wire sleeves may be in order.

You can put it all back together and the battery compartment door completely obscures the components you’ll use to customize the recording.

ADDITIONAL IDEAS:
* If you want, you can wire the audio output to a 1/8 or 1/4inch plug and put it through an audio system or into your computer instead of to the EB speaker.

* If you don’t care about hiding the controls, you could put a switch on the wires going to the speaker and be able to use either the original Easy Button audio, or the custom recording. You’ll need the batteries, though, unless you’re smarter with electronics than I am.

* You could probably wire up an audio input in place of the microphone to record other audio to the memo recorder.