Megan has a Hello Kitty keyboard that she got for christmas last year, it was a cheapy stocking filler but she loves it. The problem with it is that its very loud and when its first turned on its automatically set to near max volume – not the greatest thing for mammy and daddy at 7am!

So, popping it apart to see what we’re dealing with we find the usual cheapy china construction but at lest they’re not pushing mains voltage through it.

As a nice simple hack to reduce the overall volume we can reduce the power going to the speaker by adding a resistor in series with it. I unsoldered one of the wires and soldered a 100Ω resistor to see what affect it had on the output.

The output was a little too low so another test using a 68Ω resistor gave a perfect result. Here it is soldered into place.

Finally, i covered the lot in heatshrink to protect it.

So there we go, a very simple hack that makes mammy and daddy that little bit happier while still being plenty loud for the 2 year old!