/ hacking

Hacking Poundland

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My love for cheap electronics is well documented and the various Pound shops in Blackpool feed my need quite well.
Today at Blackpool Makerspace I worked with young hacker Josh to build a Christmas Ray Gun!
Using a Santa badge that plays Christmas songs and lights up a series of LEDs merged with a toy gun that makes a noise and lights up.
Now at the press of the trigger the gun shoots Christmas tunes and flashes an LED along with the music.

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For the project we used a soldering iron to desolder the components. We then attached the components from Santa to the gun, first of all we attached the speaker from the gun to the Santa control board. We tested the speaker and it worked!

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We then desoldered the LEDs from the Santa board, and replaced them with one LED present on the gun.
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Next we soldered the control board to the battery compartment and seated it into the trigger point in the handle.

Hey presto! It works!

The solder used for these toys is rather cheap and an extraction fan should be used, along with goggles.

It took us around 40 minutes to finish the hack, not bad considering we had no plan and did a "seat of the pants" hack :)