After figuring out the logistics of adding lights and sound to my blaster, the work of actually making it all function was still left. This part was well beyond my capabilities, but fortunately my Merc buddy Dennis knows electronics and how to solder. The first step was to solder the new switch to the board. Here's a photo of the soldered switch and board just sitting in the dremelled out receiver.
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The board and switch also had to be soldered to the custom battery pack. We decided to make the pack removable so it would be easy to swap out the batteries.
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Since we were running the speaker and the LED light down the barrel, we had to extend those wires so they were long enough to sit in the chromed tube. I had originally intended to upgrade the speaker to the lightsaber speaker you can see in the pic below, but we ran into an issue. The lightsaber speaker was 1 Watt, but the original Hasbro speaker was .25 Watt. We didn't have enough juice to make it work. The original Hasbro speaker was also too big to fit in the chromed tube, so we needed to figure something else out.
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Fortunately, he had a speaker we could use. It looked a lot like the Hasbro speaker, but had a smaller diameter. It fit perfectly on the lightsaber speaker holder so I mounted it there. We ran the wire for light down the barrel and you can see the LED light just sitting in the diffuser in this pic.
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Here is a test while just pressing the button in the receiver. I had both lights and sound. Wohoo!
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Here is a pic of the board and switch just sitting in the receiver. We were going to attach them to the top of the battery pack, but later decided against it. Once the hammerplate is in place, they don't move so we just left them sitting there. At this point, I still just had a cotter pin for the trigger and the greeblies were just placed in the right spot to see how they would look.
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Here is a test using the trigger to fire the electronics. It also worked! I started to drill and dremel the chrome tube. I've since cleaned it up, but it was nice to see the lights and hear the sounds better from the sides. The speaker and light just sat in the tube with a piece of clear scotch tape keeping them in place for now.
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So, that's one way to get the electronics from a Hasbro ROTJ EE-3 to work in a solid resin ESB EE-3. Now that the electronics worked, I still needed to some touch up the paint, add the greeblies and do a bunch of weathering and finishing touches.
