Staples Easy Button Hacking

For a project at work I needed a solid button that would be easy to press. It turned out that the Staples Easy Button was a perfect match for what I needed; heavy, easy to locate without looking for it, a great size, and it was just a single button. I opened it up and removed the speakers and disconnected the majority of the inner workings, rewiring some bits so that I could run a wire out of it and into the serial port of a computer. Then I could use the button as an input device. It worked perfectly.

Here is a step-by-step gallery that shows how to dismantle the button, remove the speakers (you could leave them in, but what’s the point? Why not take out the free speaker for use somewhere else?), tap into the switch, and re-assemble.

We start by removing screws. Keep removing screws until you can pry the speaker out. Cut the red wires and remove the speaker. Reassemble the button most of the way. Remove the resistor on top. Also cut the black and white wire coming from the battery case. Cut the traces to the chip (the black mound). Solder wires at the points shown on the images: there’s one point where the resistor used to be, and one point that’s just a bare hole. Then solder the other ends of those wires to the black and white battery wires. Now reassemble completely. You can now tie or solder wires to the pads where the batteries go and use the button for whatever application you have.