Introduction: Making a Bluetooth Solar Powered Speaker

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Hey, recently my music players audio port broke :( Instead of fixing it i decided to make an old broken speaker I had lying around bluetooth with some old scrap electronics that had been thrown away.

Heres how you can build your own. Check out the video for Visual instructions.

Step 1: Parts List

For this project you will need the following parts:

  • A speaker with the driver board (Mine came from an old portable speaker but you could build your own with off the shelf parts)
  • A bluetooth headset (Mine is an old broken bluetooth headset that someone had thrown away because the speaker was broken. Or you could buy an off the shelf bluetooth module here: https://goo.gl/g6ka71 )
  • A battery (any 3.7v lithium battery will work. Make sure you pick up a lithium charger if you speaker board doesn't have one build in)
  • Button
  • LED
  • Casing (Im just using cardboard :D)

Optional extra

  • Solar Panel (I added a small solar panel I got from some old fairy lights for a longer battery life. Remember to get a 5v regulator if your solar panel outputs more than 5v)

Tools Needed

  • Soldering Iron
  • Wire stripper
  • Glue Gun
  • Box Cutter

Step 2: About the Parts

Let's start by looking at the speaker's driver board we need to find these terminals:

  1. aux input
  2. battery connector
  3. usb power input
  4. power switch
  5. led indicator Now on the bluetooth board we need to find the
  1. speaker output
  2. battery connector
  3. power button
  4. led indicator

Lastly on our solar panel we need to get it on its own and locate the power and ground terminals

Step 3: The Wiring

The wiring is pretty simple in thought however it gets messy pretty fast, heres how we wire it up.

  1. Connect the speaker output on the bluetooth headset to the aux input on the speaker. (ground to ground and speaker + to either of the other two connections)
  2. Connect both the battery terminals on the speaker and bluetooth headset to your battery (+ to + and - to -)
  3. connect the usb power in to the solar panel with a diode in-between (check direction in pictures). If you solar panel gives off more than 5v wire a regulator in-between (+ to + and - to -)
  4. Lastly we want to extent the buttons and LEDs so we can see and use them on the casing. (- to - + to +)

Once its all done give it a test if all goes well we can start making the casing.

Step 4: Designing the Case

Originally i wanted to uses the 18650 lithium battery but i found that it was to big for my case so I ended up using a 400 mAh battery which ended up having a pretty good battery life.

The case I designed is based around the size of the solar panel, so the idea is to design a case that uses the solar panel as the roof and make all the other components fit within it which left me with a cube that slightly resembled a washing machine :D Nevertheless it works and i'm happy with it. My casing was made up of five 4.5cm x 4.5 cm (1,77 inch ) squares with the solar panel on top.

Step 5: Finished Project!

Despite the washing machine look the speaker has a pretty good battery life and can get pretty loud however there is one big downfall, the quality, while playing music everything sounds good with a slight absence of base but when nothing is playing I can hear a very faint static however it clears up when music is played.

Thanks for reading if anything was confusing feel free to drop me a message, leave a comment or check the video for some clarity :D