Tag: Audio

Bluetooth Speaker – Update

Bluetooth Speaker Project

We need a bluetooth speaker for the outside by the pool and I have also wanted one to use inside the house as well. This one is 90% complete and since I have two speakers I am sure another one will follow. I still need to find what I am going to use for front and back grills. I may settle for some black material on a frame for the front and some aluminum grill for the back. In the meantime at least it is ready to go!

IMG 9806

My bluetooth speaker

IMG 9665

cutting up the sides

I had a long scrap of wood from another project, so with the power miter saw I made quick work of the sides. 

IMG 9669

With the sides and square inner pieces cut it was time for some gluing. I used a couple of brads to help hold it together while the glue dried. 

IMG 9674

A little sanding to smooth things out. I also had to use a little putty to fill in a couple of small gaps. 

IMG 9711

I used my rotary cutter to make the hole for the speaker. It needed a little help to get the speaker ears to fit in just right. I have no idea what that PVC pipe is up there for, save the fact that I was working on the pool at the time. 

IMG 9731

Here I have things wired up. I didn’t have any barrel power connectors or even screw down terminals, but I didn’t have the parts from an old Apple Airport to get 12V power to the amp/USB board. As for the bluetooth/amp board there is no outstanding reason for picking it. I did some research on them as there are quite a few out there. I need something that would obviously deal with Bluetooth, again all of them were pretty much about the same, but I expected that. This board had the TI TPA3110D2 as the amp chip. I dug up the data sheet on it and it seemed to fit the bill for what I was looking for, a good amp chip and being able to deal with up to 20W for the speaker. 

IMG 9735

With a few brass standoffs, I mounted power plug and the board to the back of the speaker. The parts do face out the back of the speaker. In my thinking it makes it easy to replace anything if it were to burn out or I wanted to replace it. And I didn’t want the magnet to interfere with the board. 

Somewhere in here I stopped taking pictures, oops. In leu of pictures I will give you a quick wrap-up. I stained all of the parts with 2 coats. It didn’t come out as quite as dark as hoped, but it still looks good. Then I mounted the speaker on the front wood insert I made. I connected the wires to it and secured the back panel. 

It works well! It is not audiophile quality, but it has a nice sound all around. The Chinese lady’s voice they used to tell you it is on and connecting still makes me giggle a bit every time I use it. 

LM386 Audio Amp

Since entering the wonderful world of electronics, I have had an itch to make an audio amp. Probably one reason is that I am sans a real audio system right now and I am digging the hardware aspect of the hacking more than the software.

I started reading and wow there is a lot out there in amp world; but like with the Arduino I am pacing myself. I settled on a project, you can check it out here.

At the same time I am using this article to learn the math behind it all. Geesh, it has been more than a few years since I have used some of those brain cells and there are new things to learn, which is cool.

Here is the board with the hardware installed on it. So far things are looking good.

Here it is all wired up!! I wish I could say I fired it up, but putting the last wire in at around 1:45am my eyes were a little crossed. I am going to wait to get a good nights sleep then double-check my connections and continuity before applying power.

I will be sure and let you know how it turns out.