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Entry #34
After watching Iron Man I was at WalMart and was checking out the Iron Man toy that lights up, talks, etc. I decided to pick one up, you know, for my kids... (cough cough)
So anyway, the annoying thing with this toy is the light in the chest, and the light on the hand, were YELLOW! WTF! In the movie they were white. I kept thinking I could try and swap out the yellow LEDs for white ones. Well, today I decided to go for it. The nice thing with this toy is it has screws and it was easy to open the arm and get to the yellow LED in the hand. It was a standard 5mm LED, and I was able to swap it for a white one with some simple soldering. It worked great! Much brighter than the yellow LED, white, etc.
Next I decided to try the LED in the chest. This was a much bigger challenge for me. I took out the screws, and his body didn't come apart... Here there was a plastic plug that looked like part of the shell's mold, but it wasn't. I was able to carefully pry it out and access the hidden screw. Those sneaky bastards! Once the screw was removed I was able to start opening the body, but it was tough. I think there was some glue around the shoulders, or it was fused together some how. Eventually it popped / cracked open. Inside were more wires and circuit boards than I thought there would be. I unscrewed and pulled back the first plastic piece which exposed another circuit board. I unscrewed the next circuit board and pulled it out (still attached to the rest of the body by a lot of wires) and found the yellow LED. Uh oh! This LED is different! It's shorter, and flat. Hmmm. Hopefully the voltage and current to this LED are the same as the one in the hand, or it might not have enough juice to power my white LED. I figured I'd just go for it. I took out the LED, unsoldered it from the circuit board, etc. Now for the white LED, uh oh, it doesn't fit through the hole. I got out my dremel and removed just a little bit of material from the circuit board to make the hole larger and the white 5mm led fit! I didn't want to push it all the way through though because it was longer than the LED it was replacing. The LED is in the middle of a switch, similar to what is under your keyboard keys, but round like a donut, the LED in the middle, the contacts in the circle around the LED. This fits right behind the white button on the front of Iron Man's chest. If I stuck the LED through too far it could prevent the button from pressing in far enough to activate the switch. So I winged it, put it in about halfway, and soldered it in. My next worry is that when I put it back together the cover over the circuit board won't fit because the new LED protrude more than the previous one. However, it all fit back together! Got to love it when things go smoothly, but it could have easily have turned into a real bitch.
So I put it back together and it works! I now have a white light in his chest, which is his glowing power source, and a white thruster / blaster in his palm! I took a video, but I didn't take a video of the yellow LED in the hand, I took the video after I swapped out the yellow LED in the hand, but the yellow LED was still in the chest. Then I show both white LED's. The one in the hand is pretty bright, and throws a nice beam of light, as you will see when I have it by a wall.
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