T H E H A L L M A R K B O X by Clark Griswold 94' The EASY way to carry a tone in your pocket. Purpose: Generating quarter tones for phree phone calls. Cost: Under $10.00 Materials: 1 Hallmark recordable greeting card. 1 Momentary push button. (Normally off) 1 100 or 200 ohm resister (optional) 1 Plastic case. (QIC Tape case is perfect!) Tools: Soldering Iron, solder Wire cutters Hot glue gun (Highly reccommend) or any good adhesive. Drill with bits for Speaker and push button holes. A Computer with a Sound Blaster card "BlueBeep" by Hey here is my first box! Sort of. I Read about this idea on a message base somewhere and decided to make it. It is by far the best way to generate ANY tone or sound from a hand held device. The reason being is that its CHEAP, and that you can record the actual sounds or tones directly into the chip. Since adding a crystal to a Radio Shack Dialer is costly and "not exactly" the right tones, you may find your new Hallmark box to operate on more payphones. After you build one, I am sure you will build one for a friend, its easy! Since I am not technical on the DTMF frequencies I will not cover that here. The program BlueBeep will generate the tones needed for you to record into your Hallmark box, so forget about crystals! Okay here we go. Go to your local HALLMARK store and buy a couple of those "talking" cards. Buy 3 or 4 if you can afford it. When you pay the nice old lady tell her how much your family will enjoy these charming cards. Might as well thank them for their product. Hee Hee. If they only knew what they are contributing to. ;> Take the cards and rip them open. Trash the pretty greeting card in the trash and grab your dikes (wire cutters). Start cutting the parts out of the plastic frame. Use your brain and watch what your cutting. Cut out the speaker, the battery case and shit can the red switch, which probably fell on the floor anyway. The micro phone is not needed so cut the wires closer to the mic. These blue wires will be used to connect to the Sound Blaster later. Cut the GREEN and BLACK wires at the switch, you will be connecting your push button switch to it later. Now the circuit board can be cut out and then you can unscrew it or vise-versa. You should now have all the parts cut out and trimmed nice and neat. Right? Grab the plastic tape case and get you glue gun or glue ready. BTW you can build this in a cassette tape box too, but you should get a case thats soft plastic, so it wont break when you sit on it. Grab your drill and make a hole on the side for your push button switch. The speaker hole can be made with a large paddle bit or make about six 1/4' holes in a nice circle pattern. You may even find that due to the volume of the device, you can just glue it on the lid without a hole! Check it out. I drilled mine though. Ok the speaker is on the lid and right below it on the same half of the case glue the circuit board down. BE CAREFULL about the placement so that the box will close right. Glue the battery box on the other half, with the battery "tray" facing out. That way you will be able to change the batteries. Let it dry. Solder the GREEN & BLACK wires to the push button switch. You may need to add a bit of wire, due to the short wires that were on the board. Sample the volume of the speaker and see how loud it is. You may want to place a 100 or 200 ohm resister in-line on one leg of the speaker wires. This will bring down the volume to a resonable level. Everything should be glued down and connected, except for the blue wires. Right? You will now need to connect a 1/8" headphone jack to the blue wires. I just cut off one from a old headset. Make sure you have about a foot of extra wire to make it easier. Connect it to the blue wires, and remember this wire can be removed after recording or coiled up and left in the case. Plug in your HALLMARK box into the Sound Blaster speaker output. (Next to the Joystick port). Turn the volume almost all the way down. You will figure out the right volume. Now run the BLUEBEEP program and go to the REDBOX section. Now all you have to do is place the HALLMARK circuit board switch to record, and as soon as you hold down the push button it will start recording for 10 sec. Hit the "3" on your keyboard to record the quarters. I recorded 4 quarters with a 2 sec pause between them. Switch the HALLMARK circuit board switch to play and hold down the push button. How does it sound? Re record it until you get it right. Thats it. You have made a HALLMARK BOX! Does it look cool? No? Then give it to your friend and make a better one for yourself. You can paint it black if you want it to look a little less like a HACKER BOX. Now dont be a bozo and try to call a operator and call to Austrailia. You should only use this on PAC BELL phones when calling long distance or toll calls. Local calls require a deposit and that cant be done with a redbox. You will find out what you can and cant do. - Clark - Typed 5-17-94