NeonPulse

January 4th there was a Chicago Hacker meeting (Chicago 2600/DefCon 312) and an attendee handed out 1¢ BestBuy gift cards, fifteen gift cards that he put one cent on, totaling 15¢. He had the receipt to show for it too. I think it’s weird that they let him do that, the value of the special holiday gift cards had to be more than one cent, they have a watch battery in them that has to have a greater value than that.

I didn’t take pictures of the scrolling LED gift card before I transformed it into a belt clip, but here’s a set of pictures I found on Flickr of it new and then being taken apart. I thought it would make a great belt buckle so I opened it up to see what I could do with it. You may want to pop out the plastic piece that pressed the buttons so they don’t get accidentally bumped, I did this so you would have to be trying to press the buttons to actually press them. It fits the plastic shell nicely so I put it back together and just covered the front with black electrical tape. Then I set it upside-down on a cardboard box and cut off the excess electrical tape along the edges with an x-acto knife. I used a piece of cloth strap material from a small bag and folded it into a loop that would fit snugly around my belt, then I stapled it like that and melted the cut edges of the plastic-like-fabric with a lighter so it wouldn’t unravel where it was cut. I didn’t have any way to attach the belt loop to the gift card other than by taping it with thick electrical tape, so I did that. You could wrap it through the inside and screw the plastic shell shut so it would pinch the strap in place, but then the strap would be in the way of the buttons on the back of the gift card.

I like it with just “TINMAN” as the message, but I got at least three comments on it in an hour while shopping in Chicago with it displaying “Stop staring at my crotch” :]

Click below for a YouTube video of it in action: