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 sounds angry when you honk it at a light
and if you try to do a nice quick honk it doesn't usually register because it
bottoms out too quick so I just push my custom-made courtesy honk button
and because it's so non confrontational this will never happen to me
and this works for communicating in a lot of situations not just at stoplights like if someone is
just sort of drifting in your lane you're not sure if they see you or not
but you don't want to use your big horn or if you just want to get someone's
attention to tell them something if someone needs
to move forward in traffic or in a drive-thru it's nice because you don't want to
seem like a jerk as they can look right at 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 you still have your big horn that you can't
miss in the case of an emergency but there should be a smaller button right
over here for the courtesy honk but the good news is that as an engineer
if something isn't exactly how you want it you just make it exactly how you want it
so I've been on Amazon and got one of these Adafruit sound boards for 27 bucks
where you can upload sound effects via USB with no programming required and
then I got three of these cool horn buttons to trigger the sound effects for
seven bucks each so i started on this side by wiring this to my cigarette
lighter for power and then I used a 12 to 5 volt power inverter to get me to the
right voltage for the sound board which is connected to these buttons to trigger
the horn sound effects I dragged and dropped onto there and then coming out of the
board we have a 3.5 millimeter audio cable that plugs into a $13 amp to make
it loud enough which connects to a 13 dollar PA speaker now that we have all
the components my buddy Bob from the YouTube channel I Like To Make Stuff
came over and we got to work soldering actually I did all the work while Bob
just stroked that magnificent beard of his he also made a video about making a
custom horn like this that goes into way more detail so definitely check his out
if you're actually planning on doing this. This is intentionally more of a
temporary setup but I wanted mine to be a bit more permanent in the dash so with the
help of my talented buddy Howard we went to town installing this thing
now the buttons were in place we connected them through the dash to the
PA speaker rebounder to the frame under the hood. We also installed this beast
which is the same type of horn system used on trains and semi-trucks basically
there's a compressor that fills an air tank to 120 psi which powers the horn
but more on this later
and the buttons also light up which makes them look
really cool at night. I also added one more sound effect that's powered by this button
This is designed to be even one knotch nicer than the courtesy honk if you want
to be super chill and grab the attention of a pedestrian who isn't even in a car
So that's my pitch to make our roads more pleasant by increasing the
vocabulary of the standard car horn and now you can do it yourself which leads
me to this final button which is only to be use in extreme situations like when two
teenagers are taking their sweet time to 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 comes to audio books but they've been working with me and
supporting my channel for a couple of years now while making this video I
listen to the book "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman and I loved it"
Richard Feynman was a genius Nobel Prize winning physicist who chilled with Einstein and
helped discover atomic energy but that's not what makes him so interesting this
collection of stories from his life made me laugh out loud a bunch of time it
starts when he was a kid and used to take apart 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 to break into safes and use science to pick
up on women he had this lifelong fascination with learning but in a
practical sense not in a memorize facts from the textbook sense he's just such an
intelligent colorful human being so if you want to listen to "Surely You're Joking
Mr. Feynman" or any other audio book for free all you have to do is use the link in
the description or go to audible.com/markrober
Thanks for watching