Category Archives: speaker

An Eye-Catching Raspberry Pi Smart Speaker

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[curcuz]’s BoomBeastic mini is a Raspberry Pi based smart connected speaker. But don’t dis it as just another media center kind of project. His blog post is more of a How-To guide on setting up container software, enabling OTA updates and such, and can be a good learning project for some. Besides, the design is quite elegant and nice.

The hardware is simple. There’s the Raspberry-Pi — he’s got instructions on making it work with the Pi2, Pi2+, Pi3 or the Pi0. Since the Pi’s have limited audio capabilities, he’s using a DAC, the Adafruit I2S 3W Class D Amplifier …read more

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Eavesdropping Via Headphones

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We all know that speakers are microphones and microphones are speakers, right? If not, take a moment to plug your headphones into a microphone jack and yell into them. It’s not exactly hi-fi, but it works.

So it’s not a huge surprise that three security researchers in Israel have managed to turn the combination headphone and microphone input jacks that are present on most laptops into an eavesdropping device. (Paper here as PDF, with an obligatory demo video on YouTube, embedded below.) Speake(a)r is a neat proof-of-concept and a horrid pun.

There’s almost no exploit here; the just ask the …read more

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Make Your Eyes Louder With Bluetooth Speaker Goggles

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Your eyes are cool, but they aren’t very loud. You can remedy that with this build from [Sam Freeman]: a pair of Bluetooth speaker goggles. Combine a pair of old welders goggles with a Bluetooth receiver, a small amp and a couple of cheap speaker drivers and you’re well on your way to securing your own jet set radio future.

[Sam] found a set of speaker drivers that were the same size as the lenses of the goggles, as if they were designed for each other. They don’t do much for your vision, but they definitely look cool. [Sam] found …read more

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Make Your Eyes Louder With Bluetooth Speaker Goggles

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Your eyes are cool, but they aren’t very loud. You can remedy that with this build from [Sam Freeman]: a pair of Bluetooth speaker goggles. Combine a pair of old welders goggles with a Bluetooth receiver, a small amp and a couple of cheap speaker drivers and you’re well on your way to securing your own jet set radio future.

[Sam] found a set of speaker drivers that were the same size as the lenses of the goggles, as if they were designed for each other. They don’t do much for your vision, but they definitely look cool. [Sam] found …read more

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Star Trek Phone Dock Might as Well Be From Picard’s Night Stand

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Star Trek is often credited with helping spur the development of technologies we have today — the go-to example being cell phones. When a Star Trek April Fool’s product inspires a maker to build the real thing? Well, that seems par for the course. [MS3FGX] decided to make it so. The 3D printed Star Trek-themed phone dock acts as a Bluetooth speaker and white noise generator. The result is shown off in the video below and equals the special effects you expect to find on the silver screen.

Taking a few liberties from the product it’s based on — which …read more

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Star Trek Phone Dock Might as Well Be From Picard’s Night Stand

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Star Trek is often credited with helping spur the development of technologies we have today — the go-to example being cell phones. When a Star Trek April Fool’s product inspires a maker to build the real thing? Well, that seems par for the course. [MS3FGX] decided to make it so. The 3D printed Star Trek-themed phone dock acts as a Bluetooth speaker and white noise generator. The result is shown off in the video below and equals the special effects you expect to find on the silver screen.

Taking a few liberties from the product it’s based on — which …read more

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Forget Wifi or Bluetooth, Pair Directly With Your Phone’s Speaker

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[Kedar Nimbalkar] hyperbolically advertises the ultimate cell phone speaker dock. It costs a dollar. It doesn’t need you to pair with it via Bluetooth or WiFi. It pairs extremely fast, 0.000000000001, he clarifies. It may also look like a broken laptop speaker with a stomped wall wart soldered to it, but who can keep up with industrial design trends these days?

He shows us the device in operation. He starts playing some music on his phone’s speaker. It’s not very loud, so he simply lays the phone on the dock. Suddenly, all the audio fidelity a Dell Lattitude from the …read more

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The Most Impractical Bluetooth Speaker of 2016

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Ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of usable surface area in your house? Ever wish that your Bluetooth speaker was fluffier? Do you ever long for a future in which all your music is accompanied by perfectly timed light flashes. Is the gentle passing of a cumulus cloud across a bright blue sky the only thing that will keep the voices at bay? We might have the speaker for you.

Joking aside the effect is pretty cool. It’s a standard levitation doohickey at it core. While we don’t know what the inside looks like exactly, we can take our …read more

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Sending Music Long Distance Using A Laser

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This isn’t the first time we’ve seen DIYers sending music over a laser beam but the brothers [Armand] and [Victor] are certainly in contention for sending the music the longest distance, 452 meter/1480 feet from their building, over the tops of a few houses, through a treetop and into a friend’s apartment. The received sound quality is pretty amazing too.

In case you’ve never encountered this before, the light of the laser is modulated with a signal directly from the audio source, making it an analog transmission. The laser is a 250mW diode laser bought from eBay. It’s powered through …read more

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High Impedance Headphones? They’re In The Can!

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[George Trimble] likes to build crystal radios. The original crystal radio builders used high impedance headphones. In modern builds, you are as likely to include a powered amplifier to drive a speaker or normal headphones (which are usually around 4 to 16 ohms).

[George] builds his own speakers using chile cans, some wire, a few magnets, part of a Pepsi can (we are pretty sure someone will leave a comment that Coke cans sound better), and the iron core out of an audio transformer. You can see a very detailed video of the process, below.

There is a little woodworking …read more

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