How To Hack A Portable Bluetooth Speaker By Skipping The Bluetooth

February 4, 2020 by Roger Cheng 53 Comments

Portable Bluetooth speakers have joined the club of ubiquitous personal electronics. What was once an expensive luxury is now widely accessible thanks to a prolific landscape of manufacturers mass producing speakers to fit every taste and budget. Some have even become branded promotional giveaway items. As a consequence, nowadays it’s not unusual to have a small collection of them, a fertile field for hacking.

But many surplus speakers are put on a shelf for “do something with it later” only to collect dust. Our main obstacle is a side effect of market diversity: with so many different speakers, a hack posted for one speaker wouldn’t apply to another. Some speakers are amenable to custom firmware, but only a small minority have attracted a software development community. It doesn’t help that most Bluetooth audio modules are opaque, their development toolchains difficult to obtain.

So what if we just take advantage of the best parts of these speakers: great audio fidelity, portability, and the polished look of a consumer good, to serves as the host for our own audio-based hacks. Let’s throw the Bluetooth overboard but embrace all those other things. Now hacking these boxes just requires a change of mindset and a little detective work. I’ll show you how to drop an Arduino into a cheap speaker as the blueprint for your own audio adventures.

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PVC Pipe Turned Portable Bluetooth Speaker

October 7, 2019 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

We’ve always felt that sections of PVC pipe from the home improvement store are a criminally underutilized construction material, and it looks like [Troy Proffitt] feels the same way. Rather than trying to entirely 3D print the enclosure for his recently completed portable Bluetooth speaker, he combined printed parts with a piece of four inch pipe from the Home Depot.

While using PVC pipe naturally means your final hardware will have a distinctly cylindrical look, it does provide compelling advantages over trying to print the entire thing. For one, printing an enclosure this large would have taken hours or potentially even days. But by limiting the printed parts to accessories like the face plate, handle, and caps, [Troy] reduced that time considerably. Of course, even if you’re not in a rush, it’s worth mentioning that a PVC pipe will be far stronger than anything your desktop FDM printer is likely to squirt out.

[Troy] provides links for all the hardware he used, such as the speakers, tweeters, and the Bluetooth audio board itself. The system is powered by an 1800 mAh 3S RC-style battery pack that he says lasts for hours, though he also links to a wall adapter that can be used if you don’t mind being tethered. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like he has any internal shots of the build, but given the relatively short parts list, we imagine it’s all fairly straightforward inside.

While this is certainly a respectable looking build considering it started life in the plumbing aisle, we have to admit that we’ve seen some portable Bluetooth speakers with fully 3D printed enclosures in the past that looked absolutely phenomenal. The tradeoff seems pretty clear: reuse existing materials to save time, print them if you don’t mind reinventing the wheel occasionally.

Empty Can Upcycled Into Portable Speaker

August 28, 2018 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

We aren’t suggesting you go digging through the trash looking for empty cans, but if you’ve already got some empty cans in the privacy of your own home, you could certainly do worse than turning them into unique enclosures for your electronics projects. Better than sitting in the landfill, surely.

This hack from [Robin Hartley] turns an empty Cadbury hot chocolate can into a portable speaker that’s sure to get some attention. But don’t be fooled: a surprisingly amount of engineering went into this project in the form of a 3D printed structure on the inside of the can. Even if you aren’t big on the idea of putting your next project into a piece of literal trash, there’s something to be said for how professionally everything fits together in this build.

The key to this build is the 3D printed “skeleton” that holds the speaker and circuit board in place. An especially nice touch is how [Robin] designed the mount for the speaker: as it had no flange to attach to, he made a two piece clamp that screws together around the rear of the speaker and holds it in place.

You may wonder why somebody who’s clearly as well versed in CAD and 3D printing as [Robin] is might want to use an empty can as an enclosure; surely he could just design and print a case? Undoubtedly. But the goal here is to reuse what would otherwise be trash, and that occasionally means taking the “scenic” route as it were.

To take this concept to the next level, check out the upcycled speaker box we recently covered. We’ve seen some gorgeous home audio builds that started as a curbside find, but depending on how lucky you are, it’s almost like cheating.

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