Laterally Driven Speakers

This Instructable will teach you how to create a set of speakers. But, these speakers don't create sound by forcing an electromagnet up and down, they use electromagnets to vibrate permanent magnets side to side, laterally.

Step 1 Materials

What you will need:
-Saw
-Pliers
-Tape
-Scissors
- Scrap Wood or another material for a base
- Electromagnets, I pulled the ones you see from a broken CD drive
- Magnets, the smaller round magnets are pulled from magnetic ball and stick toys from the dollar store, and the two larger ones from a CD drive
- Plastic, such as from many electronics packaging
- Cardboard, such as from a cereal box
- Amplifier

Comments

[jkillpat]

Did you have to make a custom circute board? because that would be more practical that to hook up a computer to it plus it'd be SWEET to make a curcuit board output that electrical pattern.

[gamebrigada]

 Built one of these using a 2x1x1 inch rare earth magnet, a big spool of wire as the electromagnet and a quarter inch thick sheet of plastic. The thing was 2x1.4 feet in size. Lets just say I expected more out of this behemoth. It created pretty good bass, but I think the thick plastic is my problem, need to go thinner. 

[pussu]

 truly innovative and inspiring model

[BGSU]

How do you scale this up for use with a surround sound system?

[-Aj-]

good place to get an amp is to go buy one of those $10 mp3 player amps from a cheap shop. that should work, usually about 1.5w you could rip the speakers apart in them too for the coils. the magnets in a laser assembly in the cd player will work very well. seeing as your ripping apart a cd player anyway. i suggest you go buy a crappy second hand pc cd drive for cheap. anything more is just to nice a thing to destroy just for the magnets i think

[Fro]

really cool project. I just built it and spent hours playing around with it. I didn't have that small magnets so I used hard drive magnets, which were a bit heavy and definitely made it more inefficient. Also I realized it's better to suspend the plastic directly above the electromagnet (actually works best if you hold it tightly against the electromagnet, but that takes a good deal of pressure). Also I think the CDrom or hard drive electromagnets are very inefficient for this purpose, as to get a volume where I could hear the song properly, I had to turn both the Ipod (aux input) and the amp the speaker was connected to to full power. It draws like 7-8 watts that way (18-20V 500-600mA), and the coil gets very hot (like hot enough to burn if you were to hold your finger against it.

[bigbrownpaperbag]

cool, i wanna make one! so the big electro magnets are from a cd drive, such as that from a computer right? and is it possible to simply twist the wires of the electromagnets onto the wires of an old pair of headphones, so that i can put my ipod on through these speakers? or does it have to be done differently? cheers! (and really cool instructable btw)

[J_Hodgie]

To address you question about source hook-up, it needs to be run through an amplifier first, because a 1/8" audio jack doesn’t have enough power. For you question about electromagnets, I am pretty sure I got them from an old broken SCSI CD drive I had from 1993, but it could have also been an old 5-1/4" floppy drive. I also got the slightly larger permanent magnets from the laser assembly of a CD drive. Hope this helps :)

[Ian01]

They are probably from the floppy drive. I remember seeing the same kind of electromagnets in the magbot pendulum in Junkbots, Bugbots, and Bots on Wheels.

[J_Hodgie]

Thanks, That will make them a bit easier to find again.

[bigbrownpaperbag]

thanks for the speedy reply; i should have an old floppy disc drive somewhere, so i'll have a look in there. i'll also open up the cd drive again to try and find the permanent magnets. thanks again

[bigbrownpaperbag]

i took apart an old cd drive, but i couldnt find any electromagnets! at least nothing that looked like your pictures. any guidance would be great. thanks!

[cevonk]

Very cool! A company called magneplaner makesscreen (as in room divider) speakers (or used to 25 years ago. Imagine a sheet of plastic about 5 feet long an 3 feet wide, with copper wire zzig-zagging about 1/2" apart across its surface. Behind that are strips of those rubber magnets that they use for refrigerator magnets, the strips located beneath the copper wire. Now run current through the wire. Voila! The whole 3x5 panel is a speaker! You can get really close to them and your ears won't hurt because the sound is distributed over such a large area, but they can be very loud at the same time. Excellent project!

[remyzero7]

http://www.magnepar.com

it would appear they still do :)

[Bongmaster]

that link appears to be stone dead :(

[J_Hodgie]

Here's another link :)

Magneplanar Technology

[remyzero7]

thanks, looks like i made a typo. could've sworn i checked it after i posted the link though, maybe they moved. regardless, thanks for fixing it.

[royalestel]

This is really cool. I'm guessing you can't mount this thing sideways, though, right?

[J_Hodgie]

It doesn't matter which way you mount it, everything is held in place. It will work so long as the magnets and plastic are free to vibrate.

[royalestel]

Oh, well that's great!

[deathonastick]

well i hate to ask but where can i get good instructions to build an amp and where can i get the parts?

[J_Hodgie]

I'm not really sure where good instructions are to build an amp, but a Google search should yield some results. I got the motor driver and arduino from Spark Fun Electronics and scavenged the rest of the parts. Hope this Helps :)

[Shark500]

This is a great instructable. Realy clear and easy. Good job. =D

[deathonastick]

how would you scale it up to run from a stereo

[J_Hodgie]

I don't think it would be too practical to scale this up, but if you wanted to, you would need to basically scale it up with bigger parts, larger bent plastic sheets, larger magnets, etc.

[Jollyrgr]

You could drill a hole in the top at each coil and then another from the side to intersect the top hole for running the wires.

[Jollyrgr]

If you cut the grooves at a slight angle as you go into the wood (i.e. don't cut straight down) you can grasp the plastic better. In other words don't cut the groove perpendicular to the surface of the board but at maybe a 30 or 45 degree angle.

[Kiteman]

Very nice. A sudden thought - If you used a box (cigar box?) instead of the solid block, you could hide all the electronics and the coils inside. You could hack apart an old radio to provide the gubbins to drive the speakers and it would become quite a stylish object for a mantlepiece or coffee table.

[LyleUppingham]

the only thing I could see being a problem with using a box is if it would resonate too much or what

[J_Hodgie]

That would work to hide all of the electronics. If you did use a cigar box you could even mount the magnets to the top of it. This would allow the cigar box to act as a soundboard and resonate the sound to make it louder.

[binnie]

???? whats wrong with up and down action? other than the cool name > LATERALY DRIVEN SPEAKERS then, you face like not selling what you say type problems~ lol

[instructa-fan]

Dude, thats pimp!!!!! i'm makin one of these ASAP!!!

[mje]

Very clever.

[crapflinger]

really nifty...well written as well

[refused]

you got to love all the stuff you can use a Arduino for

[animaldito]

Cool. i loved the final design. how is the sound quality?

[J_Hodgie]

The sound quality isn't too bad, considering the source I am using. The tones that it makes using the microcontroller are clear.

[eviloverlord]

Most excellent DIY Speakers. Reminds me slightly of the Afrotech HD speakers,which vibrate the HD read/write head laterally.
Any chance of a few MP3s or videos to demonstrate sound quality?

[J_Hodgie]

I have now posted up a video of it working. Also, thanks for the comments everyone :-)

[darkmotion]

Swwwweeet! can you post a video? :)