oh, here we go... [courtesy horn] yes! thats what i call the courtesy honk i just pushed this custom button and it's two super quick chirps of the horn that are not only friendly sounding but it's intentionally not as loud as a normal horn, so i'm gonna show you how and why i did this and in the process i will explain what this red button does but first i'm gonna pull over. 1.3 million people die in car crashes per year so you really wanna be able to communicate with other drivers if you wanna stay safe
but if you think about it, cars only have two built in ways to communicate with each other: you got your turn signal and your horn...[normal horn] and the turn signal is fine but the problem with the horn is that it is so one dimentional is like, if your only tool is a hammer, it is really good at one thing, but it sucks at everything else and i don't know about you, but now that pretty much everybody owns a smartphone, 99% of the time i use my horn i'm not trying to avoid a crash, i'm trying to let the person in front of me know: it's time to stop reading that text they just received and that's the issue. i'm not upset. i just wanna be like: hey, dude, the light is green. no big deal and that might come as a surprise, because i drive a jetta but i'm not some hardcore angry road rage tough guy but even this jetta which has just about the
most emasculating horn possible soundsangry when you honk it at a light and if you try to do a nice quick honk itdoesn't usually register because it bottoms out too quick so i just push mycustom-made courtesy honk button and because it's so non confrontational thiswill never happen to me and this works for communicating in a lot of situationsnot just at stoplights like if someone is just sort of drifting in your laneyou're not sure if they see you or not but you don't want to use your big hornor if you just want to get someone's attentionto tell them something if someone needs to move forward in traffic or in adrive-thru it's nice because you don't want to
seem like a jerk as they can look rightat you in their rear view mirror you can even use it as a way to say thank you and i kind of feel like there should be a standard feature on all cars so youstill have your big horn that you can't miss in the case of an emergency butthere should be a smaller button right over here for the courtesy honk but the goodnews is that as an engineer if something isn't exactly how you wantit you just make it exactly how you want it so i've been on amazon and got one ofthese adafruit sound boards for 27 bucks where you can upload sound effects viausb with no programming required and
then i got three of these cool hornbuttons to trigger the sound effects for seven bucks each so i started on thisside by wiring this to my cigarette lighter for power and then i used a 12 to5 volt power inverter to get me to the right voltage for the sound board whichis connected to these buttons to trigger the horn sound effects i dragged and droppedonto there and then coming out of the board we have a 3.5 millimeter audiocable that plugs into a $13 amp to make it loud enough which connects to a 13dollar pa speaker now that we have all the components my buddy bob from theyoutube channel i like to make stuff came over and we got to work solderingactually i did all the work while bob
just stroked that magnificent beard ofhis he also made a video about making a custom horn like this that goes into waymore detail so definitely check his out if you're actually planning on doingthis. this is intentionally more of a temporary setup but i wanted mine to bea bit more permanent in the dash so with the help of my talented buddy howard we wentto town installing this thing now the buttons were in place weconnected them through the dash to the pa speaker rebounder to the frame underthe hood. we also installed this beast which is the same type of horn systemused on trains and semi-trucks basically there's a compressor that fills an airtank to 120 psi which powers the horn
but more on this later and the buttonsalso light up which makes them look really cool at night. i also added one moresound effect that's powered by this button this is designed to be even one knotchnicer than the courtesy honk if you want to be super chill and grab the attentionof a pedestrian who isn't even in a car so that's my pitch to make our roadsmore pleasant by increasing the vocabulary of the standard car horn andnow you can do it yourself which leads me to this final button which is only to beuse in extreme situations like when two teenagers are taking their sweet timeto cross the street in front of you
while fidget spinning i wanna thank audible for their support on this video not only are they the best when it comesto audio books but they've been working with me and supporting my channel for a couple ofyears now while making this video i listen to the book "surely you're jokingmr. feynman and i loved it" richard feynman was a genius nobel prize winningphysicist who chilled with einstein and helped discover atomic energy but that'snot what makes him so interesting this collection of stories from his life mademe laugh out loud a bunch of time it starts when he was a kid and used to takeapart radios to make homemade burglar
alarm and then in college at mit he used his engineering skills to pull pranks and then he eventually taught himself how tobreak into safes and use science to pick up on women he had this lifelongfascination with learning but in a practical sense not in a memorize factsfrom the textbook sense he's just such an intelligent colorful human being so if youwant to listen to "surely you're joking mr. feynman" or any other audio book forfree all you have to do is use the link in the description or go to audible.com/markrober thanks for watching