Picture it: Virginia, 2015. It's raining and the boy and I decide to create a new board game - one that is way better than Zombieland (this one would have had vampires and ghosts in it, you see). I go out to the garage to get the BoogieBoard only to discover that the thing won't clear when the button was pressed! The battery must be dead! I look for the battery compartment, but there isn't one! Panic sets in...
Then I remembered that I wasn't the only person living on this planet. Let's see what one of those fine people out there have to say. Ahh... The battery is not meant to be replaced, and a replacement from somewhere costs a significant fraction of what I paid for the unit to begin with.
Without a battery this device is basically just a cutting board so, instead of band-sawing spooky bad-guy castle parts for a board game, I decided to give the boy his first lesson in soldering and electronics. Not a hands-on lesson, mind you. More of a "just watch and listen thing" rather than a “whoops, dad, I'm sorry about burning down the garage thing". He's six. You don't hand a six year old a soldering iron. It makes me nervous enough watching him walk downstairs with a pencil in his hand, FCOL.
The idea behind this was not to restore it to its former glory. It's a "mend or make do" thing. I had everything I needed in the garage, even the half-dead AA batteries taken from the little window Christmas candles before they were stuffed back in the attic.
The pic below says it all, really. It works fine, the batteries are replaceable, and now it has a bit of Mad Max slash BTTF2 street cred thrown in to boot. Later (read: probably never), I might take apart some Dollar Store solar lights I have and incorporate those. We'll see.
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