PVC Boombox Is Not A Potato Cannon

After [Luke] built a suitcase mini-ITX rig for LAN parties he was left with one problem: he didn’t have any speakers and he didn’t want to use headphones. Not wanting to do something boring like a USB-powered speaker setup, he built a PVC Boombox.

Built around 3 inch PVC pipe, the boombox houses an off the shelf 15 W amplifier, bluetooth receiver, and charge controller. [Luke] found a deal on a dozen 1400mAh lithium ion batteries and despite the standard, “if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t use lithium” trope commonly given as advice, he forged ahead anyway. [Luke] picked up a power converter that charges the batteries and provides some protection. The batteries are charged though wall power with a transformer and a huge cap scrounged from an ATX power supply.

[Luke] is pretty pleased with his boombox. Not only does it put out some decent quality sound, the battery life should be tremendous. It’s not a ground-up build, but we think it’s a pretty nice project. [Luke] will be taking the ‘boomtube’ to the Detroit Maker Faire next month, so if you see him make sure to say hi.

14 thoughts on “PVC Boombox Is Not A Potato Cannon

  1. Okay it took me a while to find the details of the build. If you missed it look for the very hard to read white menu items on the yellow bar. Nice build but never take up UI design. Really white letters on a yellow background?
    As I said interesting build for sure.

  2. @lwatcdr I suggest you get a different browser, it looks fine to me. (In the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and IE) and I wouldn’t say “if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t use lithium” but I would say “make sure you learn what you are doing first” This is not something you want to trial and error on. Can you say pipe bomb?

  3. I am using Chrome so no it is fine I adjusted the monitor a while back to using color bars. It was readable but white on yellow is low contrast and that makes it hard to read. There are people with poor eyesight that have issues with low contrast text. But as I said nice build. The amp I find interesting but the battery pack is too iffy for my taste. Hope it stays stable.

  4. I think the design is vulnerable to some sound effects inside the box like acoustic wave equation and sound particle velocity with rogue effects on it. There are a lot of problems when the box is designed like “a tube” or some similar object and it is not designed to be a transmission-line.
    But nice project at all. best regards, go on!

  5. Don’t know if that was posted earlier in the comments but, regarding Li-ion batteries, Dave Jones made an interesting vblog about them a few days ago. Check eevblog.com for more info.

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