Most physical keys have been chased off phones, thanks to the rampant rise of touch-screen technology, but here’s a DIY project that wants to bring a smarter kind of physical key to your smartphone. Pressly is a hardware button connected to a 3.5mm male audio jack that plugs into the headphone jack of your Smartphone or Tablet. It is compatible with both Android and iOS(Jailbreak required) platforms. So, for instance, if you always wanted a shortcut to snap a photo and upload it straight to a social network you could create that function in the app which link to Pressly. Of course there are apps that can do this sort of thing, but the point about Pressly is that it’s a chunk of hardware that sits within easy reach of your fingers — thereby cutting down on the number of actions required to perform the function you’re after. Pressly is compatible with a number of apps listed further in the Instructable.

The apps compatible with Pressly will allow a range of shortcuts to be created, based on a combination of short and long presses of the Pressly key. Which all sounds great, so long as you don’t get your shortcuts mixed up — and end up turning on your flashlight instead of taking a sneaky photo, say. Or sending an SMS to your mum saying ‘I’m on my way’, instead of toggling on your Wi-Fi.

The Pressly-compatible- apps will also allow for app settings to be customised too, so in addition to a basic photo snapping shortcut you could set up a specifically sneaky photo shortcut that keeps the phone’s screen and flash off and kills the shutter noise. If you wanted to be really, really creepy. Pressly also doubles up as a FM Radio antenna for your smartphone.

Pressly is the Smartphone Button that #rethinkphone

This Instructable was inspired by Eyd84's Instructable: How To Make A 3.5mm Audio Switch and I remixed it inorder to make a Smartphone Smart Button.

Epilog Contest VII

One of the main uses of a laser cutter would be to laser cut enclosures for Pressly and many of my other Instructables too like TWIST, Component Tester. A laser cutter could have really helped with the construction of my Solar+Wind house. In the Instructables mentioned I also included the laser cutting files, which shows my familiarity with this technology. I could also use the Laser engraving feature to etch all my PCB's, it would be faster than the conventional chemical process.