Deep Dive Into The New Lite Brite 

It might be interesting to replace the LEDs with a LCD backlight panel from an old laptop for more even illumination.

Wow...this video brought me back so many years that I had to make a trip out to the storage shed and pull out my 1967 original Lite-Brite! At age 7, I remember taking some gift money from my grandparents to the Thrifty drug store and purchasing it for $4.99. Surprisingly, I kept the instructions and insert showing the 5 different picture groups you could purchase (Group 100 suggested for boys, Group 200 suggested for girls, Groups 300/400/500 suggested for both genders). First-generation units used a standard 25-watt A19 medium-base bulb as the light source; they also lacked any power switch, so my dad helped me install a cord-mounted snap switch. Another (unfortunate) modification I made was taping red cellophane to the ventilation holes because it looked cool -- not realizing blocking these caused unwanted heat buildup. So...my Lite-Brite is slightly deformed on the top side. The perforated plastic grids were referred to as "peg screens" per the instructions. The "pre-coded pictures" were 9"x12", which gives you an idea of the original unit's dimensions. The package also included several blank sheets. According to the instructions, "The blank sheets used with your Lite-Brite are black construction paper. You can purchase additional black construction paper in your favorite stationery, art supply or chain store." Over the years I purchased a couple sets of replacement pegs. At one point, Hasbro changed the formulation for the blue and purple pegs; they were noticeably lighter in color, which on one hand gave you two additional colors to work with but on the other hand meant you couldn't match colors if you needed a larger quantity. A few other accessories I acquired that I believe were introduced a year or two after Lite-Brite: Number/Mathematics Symbols and Letters kits, which were shaped like the represented characters and had multiple "peg points" that were molded into each shape and inserted into the peg screen...and the Action Lite-Brite Kit. This replaced the two original peg screens with three specially-designed screens and an "action" lever that made contact with the bottom of the screens. Pressing and releasing this plastic piece shifted the back screen so that one set of pegs was illuminated in the "normal" position and the other set was illuminated when the lever was pressed down, producing a motion effect (which varied in practice depending on the design). It's interesting how this product has been sold for 55 years by the same manufacturer and has mutated over time partially due to changes in illumination technology!

You could do stop-motion with this!

Oh brings back 50 year old memory's, love those 70s toys,this looks great.

My dad made an animated 30 second TV commercial for a local lottery back in the 70's using a lite-brite. "He" made it by locking a film student in a dark closet for two months. He melted several lite-brites using a 100w bulb. It was amazing at the time, with swirling rainbows turning into text, but I'm sure it wouldn't be now, for sure.

I remember wanting one of those as a kid in the 1960s. My grandmother taught me cross-stitching instead. Made lots of designs, gave them all away, and didn't keep one for myself!

A microcontroller and capacitors? Bah, too complicated. Having an incandescent bulb wired in series with the battery pack was good enough for me!

Maybe my memory is off, but I recall that on the old Lite Brites, the light shined through every hole unless you had some black paper in front to block it. It looks like there might be some kind of integrated shields on this one to block the light unless you put a peg in a hole?

Hi Fran. Let's see....you get a "new" toy and before having your first "play" you disassemble and modify it. A true "techie" indeed! Well done!

Years ago, I bought one for my daughters. We all had a great time together with it. Thank you for the great memories!

As I watched this video I could see my original one a few feet away. It uses the spring ternimal 6V batteries (PJ996 ?) type the "screen" is 12 inches by just over 9 inches. and comes with about twice as many coloured pegs (much deeper coloures). It also has a white plastic mesh under the black plastic front mesh. Switch is broken but can be bypassed. It was passed onto me from another families child who must have grown out of it. I've not grown out of it yet as i'm only 50!

We got one for Christmas in 1977 I think. It was fun. If I remember right, the panel was around 12" across and fit plain black 11x8 paper sheets. Ours had a stubby medium Base 40 or 25 watt CGE bulb. You could change it up or down depending how bright you wanted. YES the original pegs were very deep colours, and had long stems. I think we lost too many pegs in the orange shag carpet, and then up the vacuum cleaner which was a built in the wall style so the pegs ended up trapped in the pipes buried in the walls, & eventually we ran out of pegs.

That was an AC to AC adapter.

Fran, all we wanted to see was the bloody thing working, not you spending 30 minutes refusing to put some batteries in! But I still love your channel.

Perhaps swap the LEDs out for some warm white ones for a more incandescent color profile. Technology Connections recently had a video where he modified white LED christmas lights with colored nail polish- maybe that might be useful with these pegs too.

I remember running low on the blue pegs and reciting a little incantation to try and make there magically be one more in the pile.

I'm 57 and when I was a kid I had one (made for a very limited time) that did "animations". It consisted of a second screen behind the pegs that blocked half the holes and when u flipped a level at the bottom it move the second screen up and down alternating between two sets of holes that would be lighting up, this would let you make "moving" scenes like a two-page flipbook so to say. You were able to leave out the back-moving screen and use it normally too.

3:42 it’s says right on the box that it’s a bigger screen, so I believe what you were experiencing is the fact that you were at least 25% smaller when you were five years old.

Time to address the elephant in the room -- _Why didn't you _*_turn the room light off_*_ after you were done with your masterpiece on this new version of Lite-Brite?_ P.S. -- Your theme song ROCKS!

Many moons ago I used an original Lite Brite to make a band logo. I had one as a kid so it certainly brought back some fun old memories.

The first ever, FRANBRITE!!! Love it!!

Had one of the original sets when I was small. It used a refrigerator-style incandescent lamp running off AC if I recall. I also recall if you used all of the project sheets it came with, you could buy blank sheets in sets of 20 or something, which extended the usefulness of it. This new version appears to not require the black paper at all, which greatly extends its versatility. When I saw the label on the box "bigger brighter screen" I assumed that the unit was the size of the box, then Fran pulls it out of the box and it's disappointingly smaller. These are definitely smaller than the 1970s version, so I wonder what the size is compared to. It's also noteworthy that they're calling the pegboard panel a "screen." I can't recall the terminology used on the original, but screens were far less ubiquitous in those days.

Thanks for the review. I had the original Lite Brite, too, and I loved it. Lite Brite was a unique toy for me as a kid and a great! Childhood memory that sticks around for a lifetime. This new Lite brite is nice! Kinda wish it had a plug instead of batteries, though, but I love the led styling. Leds are the new trend now which makes this Lite brite stand out more than it did 35 years ago.

I haven't thought about the lite-brite for 50 years. I loved mine.

Gets new toy . . . takes it apart first before using it and devises a way to improve it 😎👍 I was so guilty of that too

I really don't get why you made this so complicated. You can get tiny variable voltage regulator boards for less than $1 on eBay and Ali. You could have just soldered that to the input wires of the controller board. These boards are so versatile and should be in every tinkerer's drawer.

I had a "Pocket" version in the 90's as a kid. Little incandescent bulb. Absolutely required the paper to block light so I turned to construction paper and made custom backgrounds!

The first adapter didn't work because it was an AC-AC, not an AC-DC.

The clown template was my favorite. It's such a bummer to see that they skipped out on the quality materials for a smaller & less bright appliance.

I got my 4 year old son one of these for Christmas. The backlighting kind of sucks, but he still had fun with it.

Cool! I loved litebrite too. Even got another as an adult and played more with it! I'd still play with it today. They're so cool. This new flat version is great!

The first adapter you tried was a 120 Vac to 3 Vac. The top of the adapter caught my eye as it said "AC/AC Adapter". Oh well. Great video!

I never had a Lite Brite but I do remember the ads on TV for them. I didn't know they were still making a version of the toy.

My son had one of these when he was younger and it came on all by itself in the middle of the night. Turns out there was a bunch of flux residue on the main board that was conductive when the humidity in the air got high enough and caused enough leakage current to light the LEDs. A little IPA solved the problem but it sure did freak him out that night!

I guess Fran doesn't have dozens of surplus USB cables and chargers around like some of us, or she'd just use that as the power supply

10:52 I'm sorry to be laughing so hard, but it is so genuenly nice to see someone else A) tearing into a new, as yet unused electronic item to take a look-see/modify, and B) cuss as a seemingly simple and quick task I am performing devolves into a minor nightmare in front of others. Also great content, Fran.

We were too poor for these, I remember wanting one so so bad. So, I got my daughter the Stranger Things version for Christmas this year. Very cool.

Sad that the pegs are so washed out looking. I remember them being like jewels as a child. Seems like those LEDs are giving tons of lumens, can you measure the lumens and do a side by side comparison?

That's okay, I'm 61 years old and bought myself a K'nex set to play with. No regrets. 👴

In the old days if you wanted a brighter lite brite, you took the bulb off dad's lamp in the den, and put it in the reflector base. I'm sure it was bigger than 25 watts. Probably a 60 or a 100. In that spirit, Fran bypasses the wimpy AA batteries with a 9-volt wall wart with a 5 volt regulator, stepped down to 4.7 volts. It isn't lite brite unless the plastic is in some danger of melting.

When I was in middle school, we would take the pegs and jam the round end into a plastic drinking straw, cut a slit in the other end of the straw, then use a rubber band to launch it into the sky! Hours of semi-dangerous fun..

Hey Fran I also had a light bright when I was about five years old. The next year for my birthday, some friends of my parents gave me some letters that went with light bright that were really cool and they were also different bright colors. The neighbor kids had this weird cologne called pig light, but it did not work anywhere near as good as light bright

That's an AC/AC adaptor Fran!

Did anyone else notice the first wall wart was AC to AC?

Welcome back to your childhood. Its amazing how bad things that seemed glorious in your childhood actually are when you get to revisit them many years later (I mean the original, not a cheapen'd out knock-off)

If the LEDs were UV - and the pegs contained phosphors...

Had the original as a kid and loved that thing. Now I'm a sucker for 5mm water clear LEDs.

Spirograph and Lite Brite were definitely 2 of my favorite, and therefore longest-lived toys of childhood. It's rather interesting to think back to all of the things we were allowed to just plug into 120V mains, unsupervised, back in the day, including heat-producing equipment like EZ Bake and one of my other favorites - "Creepy Crawlers", where you got to subject thermoplastic resin to high temperatures with a little electric griddle. Glow-in-the-dark was by far my favorite "Plasti-goop" compound. I'm sure it was completely non-toxic even though it smoked a bit when casting. Fun times!

7:10 Seriously Fran? That first adapter you were going to use is an AC to AC adapter. It says right there on the label!

I also grew up with the Lite-Brite. A few years ago we bought the new Lite-Brite for my nephew and I was rather disappointed with the illumination and the limited number of pegs. So I bought a second unit and used several of the LED boards to fill in the darker areas where there was obvious intent to have located LEDs before the product was cost optimized. The upside was also twice the number of pegs, albeit at twice the cost. Still not as nice as the original, but a trip down the nostalgic rabbit hole nonetheless!

Our original Lite Brite used a 120V standard incandescent bulb, with a warning sticker for "MAX 25 Watt" . Later ones had a socket only for C9 base bulb, (outdoor Christmas string) but those were typically only 12W or less. I guess people were overheating the old units with 40W or 60W bulbs.

There should have been a Lite Brite Easy Bake Oven. lol. Two toys in one. That would have been cool.

I had one in the 70s that had square pegs. The holes were squares arranged in a regular row/column grid. I guess it might have been an off-brand knockoff, or (perhaps) an early version before they went with round pegs? I have no idea what happened to it. I remember being put to bed, then quietly getting out of bed to play with it long after bedtime. I often fell asleep on the floor in front of the panel. (Foreshadowing for today's late-night internet sessions.) Thanks for reminding me about it.

Does " More Colorful Pegs!" mean that the pegs themselves are more colorful than the original pegs, or that there are more pegs included here compared to the original?

I have got to buy one of those. I cannot wait to make art on one.

i cannot for the life of me work out why you had to mount the reg and resistors directly to the board, encased in heat shrink and separately mounted with double sided adhesive with two small wires that run to the existing control board would have saved all the grief of damaging the original board and been a lot easier and neater as well. an interesting toy i see they are currently available from kmart here in australia marked down for half price AUD$10.00 as of 20/03/22

"And with Refills, you can make Buggs Bunny or Bozo the clown!" - commercial I had one of the originals from when I was pretty young and I got a second one later on. I use them as hanging lamps in my childhood "lab" up until we put a high a wattage bulb in one of them and melted it. I kept them well up into my latter teen years because I thought they would make great props for my planned epic sci-fi star trek type space adventure spin off movie.

I had one of these too! Sweet! I didn’t know they were still made with all the choke hazards.... Etch-A-Sketch was more my thing... It just needed some lights to get to the next level.... Awe, heck... At least my microscope back then had a “projector” while Star Trek TNG was a thing... It worked great in a dark closet after one’s eyes adjusted to the bulb that had about 3 volts and an inch of glass, lenses, and mirrors to do the job... lol!... “There ya’ go!” Best catch phrase ever... 🖖👍 Then came “LEGO” (coolish!). Then the “Erector Set” (kinda liked it). “Capsula” (okayish). Finally “K’nex” happened when I was an adult and... Darn! Plastic weld K’nex and...

I love it Fran but 2 things, you need to turn the lab lights off at the end and I want to see it side-by-side with an original one.

Things are getting serious when Fran drops the F bomb...lol

Back in the early 70's I received for Christmas a Lite-Brite knock off called Peg-A-Light. It had a fairly large area for the pegs. It used the same size pegs and I got extra pegs to be able to fill the whole thing. The holes may have been in line if I remember. It ran with a 15 watt light bulb so it didn't light the whole thing evenly and the foam that was on the back got crumbly after a few years of use letting the light leak through. It was still fun.

I am so tempted to buy a Lite Brite set just so I can write out "ST". And when guests ask why I would just say "it was me all along!" and proceed to laugh maniacally like a 1960s Batman villain... until they awkwardly shuffle towards the exit

This video brought back a nice memory of adding yellow LED lighting to my sister's Jody & Her General store set. Nothing shows off the products in your General Store like monochromatic lighting 😁

Whoop Fran... All was better in the past?? 😜

"Lite Brite, you can see it at ni-i-ight! Making things with, things with Lite Brite!"

Love your energy Fran, it’s an absolute pleasure to see what makes you happy

I remember seeing green for the first time. Green, just green, pure green. I was fascinated. We had a lite-brite with all the colors, although half the pegs were lost in the carpet. And yes, it had green, but like your video, the green was not pure green. It was a weak and wide bandpass centered at 535nm. It wasn't until i saw the power LED on my sister's?quiz wiz? That i saw real green. It took another 15 years before i could understand the difference between leds and lite brite pegs. The pure green color was burned into my brain. Now i understand that leds emit one wavelength, the purest way to see a single color.

I think here in the UK it was called Lights Alive from memory. Love watching you work Fran. Regards.

I had an original Lite-Brite. After all the included pictures were done, my mother brought home a pack of black construction paper. Then my brother & I were makin' dirty pictures!

Great stuff. I was thinking about 3d printing one of these.

Had one 👍 We had GREAT toys back in that era !!!

Yeah I really liked the Light Bright. It was a dual gift to my brother and I and we got a set of extra patterns and pegs too. We never turned on the light until we had completely finished the picture. And always a surprise when a couple pegs were the wrong colour

Thanks. I wondered how these new "flat screen" Lite Brites compared to the original ones.

Fran , in many wall transformers there is a fuse ! If you can get to it , it can be repaired.

Hey, Fran. Have you ever thought about printing your own custom shaped Spiro-Graph pieces?

The hacking potential of this thing. I'd turn it into a lightbox, maybe a flashlight with all those LEDs. I had one of these but it was a plug in version.

Wow, what's next? Astrolite? (You didn't say how you found the final result, given the more watery colors.

Back in the day we had a 15 watt incandesce bulb and an SPST switch. Today... a wall wart, voltage regulator, micro-controller, and leds. Progress I suppose.

I didn't realize the original light bright came out in the 60s. I was born in the 90s and got to play with one of them in the early 2000's.. Still fun back then :D Now just another example of a company that keeps reducing costs to please stockholders, while capitalizing on its former name 🤷🏼‍♂️

Don't turn it on take it apart. Fyi Dave sent me to this channel years ago. Some sort of Apollo program bit of kit being reverse engineered.

I loved seeing the old toy :-) Next up, hack in 4x LEDs for Lite Blinding Brite :-) Hey, a defining toy in my childhood was a Radio Shack 50-in-1 electronics set. I think they have them these days up to 150-in-1; it’d be fun to see you play with one of those and make some of the basic circuits with it :-)

A more expensive, but better way of making this toy would be to have contacts in every slot, and just normal LEDs to put in... having an AC 3v running at high frequency to light them all, no matter the orientation you put them in, and voila... every single LED lighting up would give more solid and even light output... if that's too complicated, just a difuser, and some 5V led strip in the back would do the trick, no strobing fancy lights, but could be easily dimmed...

Awwww, what a cute little set. I've never ever heard of these. Not popular on this side of the pond, I think. Nice simple hack. The world overuses batteries; I really think that most battery-powered devices should have a barrel jack for adapter if you wish to use it. Non-lead solder is indeed crap. And you almost swore... almost! I would probably not stop. I knew the one about Ass-U-Me :)

A fiberglass-bristle "scratch brush" is extremely helpful for removing the "solder mask" coating on the circuit board traces. Scrape a little bit of it off with the Exacto blade or ( better) a dental pick, and then clean and polish it with the fiberglass brush (even small traces of that solder-mask will reject solder and you'll never get a good connection). An ink eraser containing pumice or silica will also work. I have a couple of small battery-powered artists' erasers that I modified to hold a fiberglass bristle brush and a silica-containing eraser rod, expressly for this type of polishing and cleaning before soldering (great for cleaning chassis ground points as well).

That first power adapter was an AC one. It likely isn't broken.

Yes I always check your power adapters before you use them. I pulled out of my collection a 24v that measured closer to 30v. I also pulled out a 6v one that measured 12v. As a kid I thought that every device should have a DC jack and headphone jack, as an adult every device absolutely should have both!

All things considered, seems like a solid version of the toy. Nothing too suspicious as far as electronics goes, and new vs old colors is going to be a choice that is heavily tinted by nostaliga or not. Though I do wish they would do packs of colors so you could get lighter pegs, medium pegs or darker pegs.

At 10 min. You put a 3v supply for a 4.5v device. I agree they overshoot a little. For a 4.5v device I would use a minimum 3.8v supply, recommend 4v to keep leds cool.

My little sister had a Lite Brite. I was a Lights Alive kid though. 😁 (it kept me occupied until I was old enough for a VIC-20)

I have one from 1973, still have it, used a C 7 bulb in it, plugged in wall 120 vac.,

My favorite color is purplish purple. My next favorite is reddish red.

I love the videos. This brought me back to 4 or 5 years old playing with my mother's light bright in my grand parents basement. I love those memories.

If you measure the size by counting the number of peg holes, it appears the "new" version is less than half the size. I found a pic of what claimed to be an original, it had 19 rows x 45, and 20 rows x 44, compared to 13x30 and 12x31.

Wow that thumbnail alonr brought back forgotten memories haha

I am sort of surprised they didn't make the plastic loaded with pigment that glow when it with blue light and then use blue LEDs. That would make it brighter without adding to the cost.

Cool stuff, and thank you for adding the one more peg on top of the "N", that was driving me nuts.

I think it needs more LED's. You can do it! Big Clive would be proud. ;-)

Me: Ok. I'll order some AA batteries from Target for delivery. Fran: Ok. This probably can accept anything from ~3 to ~5V, so let's see if we can wire up this AC adapter to the contacts! :D

The "retro" content of this device and the video pertaining to it pretty much begins and ends with Fran saying "I picked this up at...the store.....".

STILL LOVE THE CONCEPT !! 🙂