Not a single woodworking tool was used for this weeks video, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful one.
This little hack is something that I’ve done to a lot of my kids toys over the years, I thought it might be useful to others who wish their kids toys played at a sensible volume too.
These Christmas Carol singing toys play a couple of songs each, when they are both being played at once they clock in at the 70+ decibel level. That equates to standing out in the street and listening to traffic, not crazy loud, but a lot louder than I would like to have in my living room.
Then there’s always the toys that sit patiently in a toy basket all day long, and wait for 2am to suddenly start playing their little song at full blast, looking at you Leapfrog Pal Puppy…
There’s a few options that I see, I can remove the batteries, I can cover the speakers, or I can modify the electronics. But taking the batteries out means there is no point in having the toy, and covering the speakers with wadded up paper/tape/cloth ends up muffling the sound more than dropping the volume.
Hacking the electronics slightly is the best option. If you’ve never done it before you might think that it is difficult, trust me, it’s not. Pretty much every toy with a speaker in it can be modified the same way. Of course, I’m only talking about battery operated toys here, don’t do this to anything that plugs into the wall.
All it requires is a simple resistor. I bought a pack of them a while back off of ebay, something like $6 for 600 in a range of different values. If you have an electronic hobby store handy you’ll be able to buy them individually for a few cents each as well. Effectively all you need to do is cut the wire heading to the speaker and then connect the resistor in between the two ends.
I have all my electronics stuff in this chest I built a little while back, so it was easy enough for me to simply open it up and grab the solder iron and everything else I need. However you don’t even have to solder the connection; twist the ends, tape them up tight and hot glue the connection so it can’t shake apart, that will probably do the job just as well.
After doing just this hack to both these Christmas Toys, I was able to measure the decibel difference with an app on my phone. It dropped from over 70, to the low 50’s. That is a huge difference. It’s still loud enough to hear and for the kids to play and sing along with, but it doesn’t hurt your head and grate in your ears any more, it’s a pleasant level to listen along to.
And because I haven’t muffled the speaker in anyway, the sound quality is as high as it was before. Win, win. The kids were a bit scared when they saw me take the tools to their toys, but now that they can play with them whenever they want they are quite happy with the modifications made.
Don’t forget, this isn’t just for Christmas toys. Think of all the annoying toy fire trucks, sing song princesses and other noise making toys your kids have, go order a bunch of resistors and tell those toys to shush right now!