I am new to the toy adapting world. My son is 5 and has motor and vision impairment. I am attempting to adapt a few of his toys but I am stumped by the Beatbo Jr. The three wires (brown, brown, and red) and not sure how to connect them tot he red, white, and yellow wires of the headphone jack. In addition to this, the wires from the circuit board are connected with the white connector leading up to the body and head of the toy. So I am not entirely sure which wires to cut and connect or if I must solder directly onto the circuit board. Any help would be appreciated.
So lets start with the headphone jack. Most headphone jacks because they are meant to play music have 3 wires (Left, Right and Neutral). What we need the jack to do is operate more like a light switch that completes the circuit when press and activates the toy. So we only need 2 wires on our headphone jack to operate the toy. It isn't as easy as cutting or not using one of the wires on the headphone jack though. Without going into crazy details about how the jack works you need to determine which two wires on the jack you need to combine together so that it operates the toy property. So basically you will have two wires. 1 single wire and 1 wire that is 2 wires combined together. There isn't a set standard for how these wires are identified so you will have to play around a bit to figure out which ones need to be combined. The ones we use for example has a red, white and bare wires. We have to combine the red and bare wires together and the white one is on its own.
I apologize if you knew this already but figured I would cover everything I can.
Now for the toy. I don't know off the top of my head and I can't tell from the picture exactly how that toy needs to be connected to the jack. Here are some tips that may help you figure it out.
The easiest way to determine what you need to connect your jack to is figure out how the button on the toy completes a circuit and activates the toy. Some toy's buttons have a simple switch and wires connect that switch to the circuit board. If this is the case you are in luck because all you need to do is cut the wires that are going to the switch (as close to the switch as possible) and solder your jack to those wires. (1 wire from the jack to 1 wire from the toy for both wires.)
Other toy's buttons connect the circuit directly on the circuit board. These usually have a rubber dome that when the button is press pushes the dome down onto the board and touches both sides of a small circular disk on the board which completes the circuit. These types of toys can be challenging. You can usually do them one of two ways. 1. You can solder your jack directly to the disk on the circuit board. This can be tricky. You want to make sure you use lots of flux so you don't burn up the board. If you look closely at the disk you will see that it has two parts that are kind of woven together. You need to solder one wire of your jack to each side of the disk making sure that your solder stays only on one side and doesn't touch both. (if it touches both the toy will constantly go off.) 2. Try are determine where each side of that disk goes to on the circuit board. If you can figure out where that is you can often times connect you jack to which ever node the disk is connected to.
I hope this helped. Next time we get a Beats Boo Jr in we will try to make a video.