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Projects

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Realistic CB Radio Retrofit

Ode for Tandy Corporation, Fort Worth, Texas 76102

After a few years, regardless of maintenance or usage, the power source of a mobile phone which allows it to be mobile, its battery– usually a frail foil sack of lithium salt in solution– is said to begin to lose its "life".

Meanwhile technology, or at least its consumer-oriented quantifiers– what we say are its features– has plateaued. Both wireless signals and microprocessors are reasonably fast and readily available around the world. This plateau of features stretches over a timescale in multiples of what is considered exceptional longevity for chemical batteries.

Handset manufacturers may not explicitly plan the resulting obsolescence, but the final vectors of product design and industrial engineering rarely point toward a device being in existence– let alone production– as little as 5 or 10 years on.

Here, the purpose for giving new life to an old object was to blur the line between new technology and the obsolescent.

Pulling this project off required 1) the combination of several circuit designs to compliment various input and output requirements, 2) describing the corresponding features as a micro controller program and 3) designing a custom printed circuit board to not only connect all the pieces, but also to fit inside the original case without changing the existing aesthetic.

The first step of the process was disassembly, to reverse-engineer the parameters of the vintage elements and to create an electrical prototype on several breadboards. Next was a back-and-forth of measuring the mechanical nature of the device and translating the measurements into a physically compatible board using CAD software. PCB fabrication was done using OSH Park (oshpark.com) and assembly was completed with only minor adjustments.

And I should mention, most components including the small rechargeable battery are easily replaceable.