No glove, no love

Firstly a big thanks to Bruce, who has been good enough to do some of the fiddly soldering that had me break the previous phone. The new device is a Samsung x640, which means a colour screen and even a camera phone. So far the following parts have been done:

- Phone disassembled.
- Battery hard wired in to phone circuit
- Keypad has had wires soldered to all the important buttons
- Remaining keypad has been attached back on to the circuit
- Screen has a wire frame around it ending in a tripod.
- A hot glue gun has been used to reinforce the solder points.

The device can be turned on and off by connecting the 2 wires from the power button.

The next step will be to solder the wires on to the buttons. At the end of this, the device should be fully functional, although rather awkward to use as each of the push buttons will be floating around.

From there the finger sections need to be made using the sections from the leather glove and reinforced with copper wire. I may plat the wire again, as this turned out to be strong but flexible. The down side is that it then becomes rather large and hard to stitch in to the leather of the glove.

The microphone and speakers will need to be removed and their wires extended. This will be the final bit of fiddly soldering, as the microphone has a couple of tiny points to attach the wires to/from. This will allow me to replant the speaker and mic in the finger and thumb. An alternative if this proves too tricky is to find the hands free kit. This plugs in using a tiny jack port, which can then be split quite easily.

Once the fingers are created, they will be attached to the body of the glove using leather lace. Hopefully this will avoid putting strain on the soldered points, though given that the points will be reinforced with the glue gun, it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

The final piece of the jigsaw will be to attach the phone body and battery to the back of the glove. If it is still looking rather steam-punk-ish, then I’ll look to paint the various components in copper to give a more distinctive look.

A side issue that I need to give some thought to is that the sim card slot is on the back of the keypad board, I’ll need to have access to it. Perhaps a simple hinge a latch would work, but this will need some consideration.

At the end of it I want a glove that has an air of professionalism to it. This means that the design and style should have a level of consistency across the glove and there shouldn’t be too much loose stitching/ big blobs of glue etc.. It should also be functional. This means that not only should the device physically work, but should be possible to send and receive text messages and calls without constant adjustment or fiddling. Stay tuned!