Assignment 2 - Soft speaker

DIY Soft speaker. Documentation & coil design

Making a DIY soft speaker using the laser or vinyl cutter.

Documentation

1. Strip about 3cm of 4 female wires.

2. Put 2 of the 4 wires into the holes of the jack connector. Pull them from inside the hole to the outisde (see picture) so that it stays better.
3. Remember which color wire you put in which hole of the headphone jack. (In this case the white wire is put into GND (-) because it is the long part, and the green wire is put into SIGNAL (+) because it is the short part.

4. Put the ends of the two wires into + and - on the mono amp. (Depends which wire you put in which hole of the headphone jack).

5. Loosen the screws of the blue block and put it on the mono amp. Then, put the crocodile clips into the holes of the blue block, and tighten the screws (see picture). The black crocodile clip belongs to Ground officially.
6. To adjust the blue block on the mono amp you need to solder it. Turn the mono amp around and put wax on it. (See GIF).
7. After you put the wax on it you start soldering. First: Heat up the spot that you want to solder the tin on. In this case its on the circles from the mono amp. After that you bring the tin next to the solderering iron. When you think you have enough tin you put the tin away and leave the iron for a few seconds to let the tin flow. When you remove the iron you should have a pyramid of tin on the mono amp. (see GIF). (Loes helped me and Britt with soldering)
8. When you have soldered the blue block on the mono amp for the crocodile clips, you start soldering the black block where the 4 stripped wires need to go into. You use the same soldering technic.

9. After soldering the blocks on the mono amp you start soldering the 2 stripped wires into the holes of the headphone jack. (see GIF) It makes it easier to put the wires into clips like on the GIF.
10. After the soldering is finished you can start on designing! :D See my design below.

Coil Design

Because the design can only be one continious line I was first thinking of a sacred geometric pattern. But very soon I came to the conclusion that this design will be complicated to make because of the different patterns that have to connect and many rules that this style has. After making various sketches I was thinking about modern cubism. An art movement where I noticed that many lines and elements are connected with each other. Because it is so abstract it doesn't matter where the mouth or the eye is on a portret, which makes designing a coil pattern much easier; there are way less rules than with a sacred geometric design. My design is a portret of a singer that has a microphone attached to it, i thought this would be fitting with the speaker. The line starts at the microphone and finished in the eye but it does not close.

Dusanka Prvulovic, DIY soft speaker, 2020

From sketch to illustrator

Coil design open line for vinyl cutter

1MB

dusanka_wk02_coil pattern.ai

Making the speaker

When the design was created and the details were finished in Illustrator I printed out my design on paper. Because the copper wire is flexible we chose this as our conduction material so that we could follow the design easiliy. We taped the printed drawing to the background material (See photo). And after that we followed the design with the copper wire and taped that to the drawing so that it would stick to the background material. After the copper wire was taped on the design with tapes I started sewing the copper to the material. (See GIF)

When the copper wire was sewed on the background material I had to rip off the paper underneath the copper wire so that only the wire was on the background material. This was pretty hard to do because some sewing wire would untie and because of that the copper wire came off the background material and I had to sew it back on and the design got less neat because of that. Also, I cut the paper with scissors and I accidentely cut a copper wire (see photo). We had to solder this back so that the circuit was closed again. Luckily, we soldered the good parts to each other so we didn't had to solder it twice.

Finishing result

Me and Britt measured the amount of Ohm from the speaker with a multimeter. Because the copper wire had some coating on it we had to burn the coating off on the ends where we had to put the pins on from the multimeter. We had some extra windings of copper wire on the back of our design to get some more resistance, it was also nice to put it on the back so that it wouldn't bother our design.

Dusanka & Britt, DIY soft speaker, 2020

The design had 8 Ω, which is exactly what we needed to have to make some noise with it. The sound was not too loud, I think this is because we used a pretty thick background material which blocks the sound.

For my next iteration I would like to use other material and a different design to see if it the sound would be louder.

Application idea

For the application I thought it would be a nice idea to have it in for example a magazine or in a newspaper. It would make good advertisement or just a nice way to hear the mornings' news.

Dusanka, DIY soft speaker, 2020

Reflection

I am very happy about the design. Athough I don't think the end result is very neat because it was hard to bend the wire exactly as I had designed on my laptop. I also don't like the look of the background material, also because it blocks the sound, I think. Overall I am happy that it is working and that it looks quite unique.

13MB

dusanka_wk02_application.psb