My favorite present of the year was a surprise from Michelle: an oversized LEGO Darth Vader store display from Target. There were only 200 of these produced and they were not for sale, intended only as displays to be destroyed/discarded after a certain amount of time. But some weren’t destroyed and ended up on eBay instead, where Michelle nabbed one for me after I had told her repeatedly that I wish I could have one, every time we saw one in the store. And now I do!

It arrived with two red/black pairs of wires hanging out of the back. In the store, it was part of a larger display with lots of LED lights, a plexiglass front, and a battery pack holding 16 D batteries. So I had to figure out on my own how to power this thing. After wire cutting, splicing, electrical taping, and testing, I determined only 4 D batteries were truly needed to make it work.

So off to Radio Shack I went, the day after Christmas, in search of a solution. I came home with a project enclosure box, battery pack designed to hold 4 D batteries, and a toggle switch. After a couple hours of cutting, drilling, twisting, splicing, twisting (and scraping my hand with a drill bit meant for concrete), I assembled a perfect little battery box with a handy switch on top that turns on both the red light saber as well as the head/arm movement. But that wasn’t enough.

I also grabbed a Darth Vader breathing sound effect box I had previously purchased at Party City a couple months earlier, rewired its switch to allow it to toggle the sound loop on and off, and placed the whole thing in the back of the display. And in the end, it moves, it breaths, it lights up, and it’s awesome.