OK, so maybe it was more of a mod than a hack, but the end results were the same. My iNecklace was now pulsating a beautiful purple instead of the stock white. I’m not so sure purple would have been my first choice, but it’s my wife’s favorite color and she loves it.

I started out with every intention of desoldering the micro-sized LED in the necklace and replacing it with one from my unwieldy pile of SMD LEDs that always seem to get mixed together against my best intentions. My iron was hot, tweezers in hand, and all I had to do was open the back and get to desoldering that stock LED. Then it hit me, literally hit me. Well, it was more of a poke, but it grabbed my attention nonetheless.

My daughter, looking over my shoulder as I unscrewed the back of the necklace to gain access to all of its little bits, notices something, taps me, and says, “Can’t you just color that, Daddy?” She was pointing at the white plastic diffuser. She was onto something.

“Yes, yes you could, but that; that’s too…” And that’s when I turned off my soldering iron, and got out the Sharpies. Sometimes a second set of eyes, as young as they may be, can be a great asset when tackling a new project. In this case, it saved me a lot of time and the end results were nondestructive, which I preferred.

Now the necklace can be changed to almost any color in a matter of minutes. It, in fact, it was a far better solution. And that’s how my hack turned into a mod. If you’re interested in modding your iNecklace, I posted up a how-to in Make: Projects. Hope you like it.

iHacked the iNecklace