Happy Beeps!

One of the coolest things about Star Wars is the droids. While visiting the Galaxy's Edge, we were surely going to get the chance to build one ourselves!

Here's the entrance to the Droid Depot. You can try to walk in and build a droid, but we were good enough to make reservations months ago to be sure to get the chance. Think "Build-a-Bear" but the Star Wars droid version of that.

There's a fun belt of droid parts working it's way across the ceiling. Check out that Battle Droid head!

Up there, above the build stations, is a "mouse" droid! That's the little thing on the Death Star that Chewbacca roars at and it sqweeks away.

Waiting in line, you can see the available droid pieces. So you can start to get an idea of the type of droid you can put together. There's two basic types, the "BB" style and the "R2" style. They are fully remote-controlled and, yes, the balls roll and don't fall over.

After you pay, you get a basket showing you which pieces you need to collect. This conveyor belt constantly runs the various pieces in front of your spot. It was a lot of fun picking up the parts and checking them out like a real salvage yard.

This piece looks familiar! I'm sure the real R2-D2 is fine somewhere around here.

Before we got here, we imagined getting this style R2 droid. but in green. They didn't have any in that color, but this purple one looked cute. So it wound up cool anyway. Later research says this style head is an "R6" model.

Above the conveyor belts you can check out movie-quality scraps. I'm sure there's stories for all of those things up there.

Once you collect all the pieces, you take them to the build stations for assembly. There's an actual screwdriver and you really plug this thing together. It's a lot of fun.

Once it's put together, you place it in the activation chamber and "bring it to life!" It starts chirping away like "hello! I'm your new pal!"

After the droid is built, There's lots of other droid-related merchandise to check out. Here's some restraining bolts if your droids need to be disciplined. Or your refrigerator.

This stuff is only available HERE, so make sure to get it before you leave. I might have gotten this Jawa Salvage sign for a friend if I would have known better.

You can buy accessories for your droid. Here's a fun drink serving tray for your R2 to spill drinks on.

We bought the purple panels to go along with our purple droid head. We almost got the green sticker set, but thought that a green and purple droid would look too much like it was trying to be The Joker from Batman.

Also got those optional laser blasters. They plug into the droid's legs and go "pew pew!" like you imagine they do.

Here's a K-2 Imperial Security Droid in the cage. You'll get a smile when I translate that sign; it says "Notice: These aren't the droids you're looking for."

This Medical Droid looks like it needs some healing itself.

 Check out the cute Pit Droid from the podracing! Hit the nose!

You can buy "personality" chips for your droid, altering it's beep-y "voice." As we were pressing these buttons testing them out, The droids in the boxes were having conversations with it. They react to nearby beeps. We went with the blue chip since it sounded like classic video game style beeps.

There's mugs and stuff here, too. I guess it's not all for the droids. It's neat they keep the in-universe theme by having this advertise the Droid Depot Store and the BB-series droid drive manufacturer. Like a character in the movie might have.

Yep, R2-D2 is here saying hi to all the droid fans. Everybody gets a photo op with him.

We had the droids sent back to the hotel, to avoid carrying them around all day. Meet our new pal R6-T1. We call him either 61 (Sixtee-One), which upside-down is "19" marking the year we got him, or the nickname "Bow Tie" on account of the one upper black panel that looks like a little droid-version bow tie. Did I mention these are remote-controlled? He likes to chase puppies and dance.