Star Trek is often credited with helping spur the development of technologies we have today — the go-to example being cell phones. When a Star Trek April Fool’s product inspires a maker to build the real thing? Well, that seems par for the course. [MS3FGX] decided to make it so. The 3D printed Star Trek-themed phone dock acts as a Bluetooth speaker and white noise generator. The result is shown off in the video below and equals the special effects you expect to find on the silver screen.
Taking a few liberties from the product it’s based on — which was much larger and had embedded screens — makes [MS3FGX]’s version a little more practical. Two industrial toggle switches control a tech cube nightlight and the internal Bluetooth speaker. An NFC tag behind the phone dock launches the pre-installed LCARS UI app and turns on the phone’s Bluetooth. Despite being a challenge for [MS3FGX] to design, the end product seems to work exactly as intended.
The effort that went into giving the dock an authentic finish really pulls this together as a DIY project. It’s too bad that we can’t buy one for ourselves!
For perhaps the most unique phone dock out there, this man has one embedded in his prosthetic forearm.
[Thanks for the submission, MS3FGX!]
Cool build. Plus I love the LCARS app (need to download).
He needs a variety of selection sounds. That one was already annoying the third time he touched something.
At the time of making the video there was an issue in the app where only noises past a certain length played properly due to the time it took the BT speaker to “wake up”. So the more common bleeps/tweet noises LCARS makes wouldn’t work and had to be disabled in favor of the longer tones.
This has since been fixed in the app.
great….another project I have to add to my list….
so much to do, so little time…
I don’t often think “Take my money!” but yeah – this is a studio-prop quality build. Well done. I think the beep annoyance can be tuned out of the LCARS UI. I had something like this on my Palm device years ago and the beep problem is real.
Also, if you want great starship operational noises, play with the “Warp Speed” version on mynoise.net: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/spaceshipNoiseGenerator.php Sadly their app is only available for iDevices, so you have to go through a browser to get there.
Of course it is. The bleeps and bloops are not there to support the presumptive user of the device, they are audio illustrations for the benefit of the viewer of the show.
It’s a great build but the flip switches killed it for me, he needs some TOS switches, they make plastic replicas, like these.
http://img0123.psstatic.com/181339037_star-trek-tos-captains-chair-control-prop-replicas-.jpg
The console would need to spark when there is a power overload on the TOS version!
ONLY thing I would change are the flip switches. I would place two pressure sensitive switches on the side and make faux weighted crystals to place in those spots.
Nah, TNG era was all touchscreens. But let’s be honest, an ‘lcars button’ sticker, a shaped piece of plastic and a latching press switch would be close enough.
Most of the “touch screens” on the show were in fact just stickers on lighted acrylic.
Its a work of art and I would love one.