Hey everyone i’m new to being a member of this site, but have enjoyed it for years..I have been a GB fan since I was 5 years old..I consider it to be a life long franchise that I am always gonna love..Like most fans there is one thing I have always truly wanted, a Proton Pack..But not really in the ball park to spend thousands of dollars on one on Ebay or a kid from VideoBob. Now i’ve always been impressed with the Dollar Store Proton Pack as well as several of the junk packs. I guess my post is more of a few questions…You see i’m thinking of building a junk pack but I want it to be able to light up and have sound..I only wish to have three cyclotron lights, the power cell, and for the thrower to have lights when I press a intensify button…But I also want the sounds in it as well..Is there a cheap way to make my vision a reality? How hard is it to wire something up like i’m talking about? If anybody has any suggestions I would love to hear them..Please lemme know..Thanks for allowing me to come on here and pick the brains of pack builders..Oh also I know about the Jupiter lights, I want every aspect of this pack to be of a budget scale…Thanks guys.
Adding lights and sounds will probably be more than the rest of the pack if you do a dollar store/junk build. There’s some good examples here of lights that are dollar store builds and even ones that have a speaker and play sounds from an iPod. However if you want button presses to trigger light and sound changes, that’s where it can get expensive.
For lights, the cheapest I could price out, combined with ease of use, would be something like an Adafruit trinket micro controller ($6-9), one Adafruit neopixel stick for the power cell (8 lights, $6), 4 smaller neopixels for cyclotron ($4-8 for a set), then your assorted wires, switches, battery packs (which all add up). An Arduino add on shield for sound will be ~$25-35. You could go with an Adafruit audio fx sound board ($20-25) which could also replace the trinket. Then you need speakers.
You might be able to do this cheaper if you swap out the expensive neo pixels for normal LEDs but then you need to add the cost of shift registers, circuit boards, etc.
So like I said, in that quick google search, the cost of the light/sounds to do that will be expensive for a dollar store build. You may just want to get cheap battery powered Christmas lights and play sounds from your phone.