Some seashells are easy to carve (and of course most kinds of wood are easy to carve), so I thought it would be interesting to carve out holes in a shell or a piece of driftwood for access to the screen, buttons & usb-out of a small flash-based mp3 player. So the shell would be the external case, and the player wouldn't really be modded except possibly with extensions for pressing the buttons and/or a short extension cable for the usb-out (when not in use, this extension cable could fold into extra space inside the shell or piece of wood). Other possibilities: dried ornamental gourd or squash... thick animal bone (h-huh, huh)... and how much do animal skulls cost...?
-- allterrainbrain, Feb 22 2006

Shell Cell Shell_20Phone
[DrCurry, Feb 22 2006]

operculum http://www.applesna...t/anatomy/shell.php
Screen for a snail [csea, Feb 22 2006]

Cool. And cool acount name.

Perhaps you could sell kits, so that crafters could make up their own cases, the way people do now with clocks?

(You do have to solve the minor problem of how people see the display, of course - does it stick on the outside, or do you provide a cut-out in the case?)
-- DrCurry, Feb 22 2006


[DrCurry] The operculum is ideal for a screen, see [link]. I'd worry more about how this is powered - tiny battery or shaken coil and supercapacitor?
-- csea, Feb 22 2006


Ha! I missed the cell phone post -- that would be a little tougher to engineer (at least til we have actual working speech-recognition technology) since there are lots more buttons you need access to. Great point about the battery in my player -- the ideal player would be something I unfortunately haven't seen anywhere yet, which is a cheap flash-based player with a rechargeable battery that accepts charge via the USB port. Maybe solar power! I guess realistically we're talking single AAA battery in the player, so I would have to mod the battery-compartment cover & the contacts so the battery could just slide into a hole not much bigger than its diameter (boy... I'm full of Beavis & Butthead moments tonight)
-- allterrainbrain, Feb 22 2006


I love the idea of a rodent skull mp3 player - it must be just how they listened to their mp3s in medieval times.
-- fridge duck, Feb 22 2006


As long as you could hear something other than the ocean when you listen, it sounds great. There are keyboards and such made out of wood and other more natural, renewable sources. I'd love a bamboo iMac.
-- brackish, May 21 2007



random, halfbakery