NICEST Car Horn Ever- DIY

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