I’ve been wanting to make a speaker for a friend of mine for a long time, but they had one problem with my speakers, size. They just didn’t have the space for one, they also drive a motor bike so even if they did they couldn’t take it anywhere cool. I’ve been trying to make smaller lighter ones for a while now and there’s always been a lot of compromises mostly on amplifier power and and they wanted it to be as powerful is it’s larger cousins, and with this I accomplished both. But first lets start with the case.
I was lucky enough to find this cool child’s suitcase, It’s been around a bit and has a lot of cool stickers, the more stickers the better. To solve the 2nd problem I ditched the SLA batteries I’d use in the previous models, li-on batteries are about half the weight for the same energy. I also found this kit made by sure electrics (not to be confused with shure audio).
this is the 2 x 30 Watt 8 Ohm Class D Audio Amplifier Board BT 4.0 APT-X – JAB2-30 it incorporates everything, charging for 3x 18650 batteries, I used Panasonic’s NCR18650B, due to their high capacity, it also has built in bluetooth and can be ordered with all the cables you’d need to build something like this.
The only things you need to supply are a power switch and a charging jack, and batteries.
I used the same style of glowing red ring power switch from the MKII which he had given to his girlfriend.
I wired up the switch to the normally closed and wired the power on to the led
One modification I had to make was to snip one of the wires on the supplied AUX jack for some reason it was causing bad feed back, I think this wire is important for the 15w model though.
weighing in at just over 2kg with 30watts of power this is probably the best speaker I’ve made to date, and while the kit isn’t perfect, it really streamlines making one of these things. My main problems were, Sure recommends a 12v power supply and it will work, it won’t charge the batteries unless you use at least a 15v power supply, so I ended up having to order two power supplies, and problem with the aux jack while easily fix took a while to debug, and there wasn’t much in the way of documentation, what is there isn’t clear and I accidentally hooked the speakers up out of phase first time assembling it. I will defiantly be using this kit again in future builds, Maybe with a few modifications like a battery fuel gauge.
J.
JT Lowry 