Bluetooth Umbrella

This idea crossed my mind on a rainy day. I was walking to the university, sheltering under my umbrella, and, as usual, listening to music through a simple phone headset with one button and a mic. I like my headset because I do not need to take the phone out of my pocket to change tracks or answer the call.

But carrying an umbrella makes your hands busy, so that switching tracks becomes difficult. Suddenly I realized that on the umbrella handle there is a lot of free space to install buttons on. So it was decided to create an umbrella with a set-in bluetooth music control.

What shall we need for this awesome project?

• Umbrella (any one)

• Bluetooth button for remote camera shutter ~ $3.5 ($0.5 on Aliexpress:)

• Some wire and soldering-iron

• 3D printer

• android smartphone with BTU controll (Android studio project: GitHub

As you see, the project is not too expensive. You can save on 3D printing, if the umbrella handle is wide enough.

At this stage, you need to carefully break your umbrella: separate the handle from the rest of the umbrella. Then you will see how you can make your umbrella "smart".

On the left of the second photo you can see a disassembled bluetooth-button.

Now you need to disassemble bluetooth-button and make it as slim as possible for ease of installation. For our project we pull out battery and buttons, so we unsoldered them and put wires on there places.

3 picture can help you to solder wires correctly (button places).

Next step (optional) is to make a 3D model of your future handle.

All 3d models for КОМПАС3D and 3D printer in attach. You can use any 3D drawing program you like.

For better bonding you need to protect the glued parts (in future) from the paint.

After that your task is to choose handle color! My choise - red. We use universal paint for cars, furniture and other materials.

When the paint is dry it's time to stuff the handle with electronics.

First you need to mount the chip inside and pull the wires into the holes. I used termoglue to fix wires into there holes.

The most difficult step is to place buttons so that there will be easy to press them. For me, the most difficult was to solder this small buttons to the wires.

Let's join all the parts together!

Android studio project: GitHub