How to Add Sound Effects to any Lego

Brick by Brick Build Instructions here

If you've seen my Darth Vader's Bathroom videos you know that I have a lot of fun adding sound effects to things. With Christmas just around the corner, I realized there may be some parents out there looking to add more power to that awesome Lego set they picked up on Black Friday. So, I thought I'd put together a quick tutorial on how to make a custom sound effect box to add to any Lego.

I use the FOSA Voice Recording Module* for the actual sound effects. There are a lot of other options out there, but I like this one because it's been consistently the most affordable and the battery life exceeded my expectations.

It's super easy to use. After you pull the little yellow tab, it's active and all you have to do is find the sound you want to play, push the button attached to the red wires, and start the sound effect. Then push the button again. After that the black button sets off the sound effect. It has a pretty significant recording time. I have a pretty long section of the Darth Vader March recorded and it plays consistently. The one thing to note is the speaker is also the microphone. So, I set the speaker on my phone or a Bluetooth speaker when recording to get the loudest sound out of it.

Once you've got the recording device you'll want to see if you can just add it directly in empty spaces in the Lego itself. I wanted to add Darth Vader's "I am your father" line to the Darth Vader Helmet* set. After looking over the set there was some possibility of incorporating it into the base, but I didn't want to completely re-engineer that. So, I decided to build an external box that I could add to anything else if I got bored of this.

Then things got really complicated. We have a huge amount of really weird Legos floating around, but most of the standard bricks not in completed sets went into the Tower of Light and farm house that my son built to go with my books. So, I really needed to get some basic bricks. I decided to get the Lego Classic Kit* because it had a wide variety of basic parts. Here's what I used to make the box for the sound effect machine.

Here's a quick video of the build

Note, I wanted to leave the speaker open to help with the volume. I didn't find a set of grill pieces in this kit that would work, so I left the face open.

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