Oh here we go yes, that is what i call the courtesy honk. I just push 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 going to show you how and why i did this and in the process i'll explain what this red button does. But first i'm going to pull over 1.3 million people die in car crashes per year, so you really want to be able to communicate with other drivers.

If you want to stay safe, when you think about it, cars only have two built-in ways to communicate with each other. You got your turn signal and your horn and the turn signal is fine, but the problem with the horn is that it's so one-dimensional. It's like, if your only tool is a hammer. It's 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 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 want to be like hey dude, the light's green, no big deal, and this 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 and 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-through, it's nice, because you don't want to seem like a jerk as they can look right at you in their rearview 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 bighorn that you can't miss in the case of an emergency, but there should be a smaller button right over here for the courtesy hunk.

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 went on amazon and got one of these adafruit soundboards 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 start on this side by wiring this to my cigarette lighter for power, and then i use 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 drag 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 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 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, we mounted 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, oh 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 notch 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 used in extreme situations like when two teenagers are taking their sweet time to cross the street in front of you, while fidget's spinning, thanks for watching you.