Electronic Mute for Trumpet & Cornet (Poor Man's)

My neighbours have started to complain a lot about my trumpet practicing until late hours of the night.

So I recently bought an electronic mute produced by Yamaha. The silent brass is an amazing system, it silences your trumpet but also produces a very nice trumpet sound somewhat electronically and delivers it only to you by earphones. It can even generate echo effects etc.

The silent brass consists of two pieces, a mute which goes into the bell of the trumpet and a second unit that actually generate the sound which you can hang it to your belt. And this second unit houses two AA batteries.

Well I thought it was a great system but found out several points that can be improved :p. So worked on a new design.

Here it goes :D

Step 1: Electronic Trumpet & Cornet Mute

First of all my mute is smaller. And it hasn't got a second electronic unit. Everything is inside the mute. The battery(yes there is only one AA type) and the necessary electronics are all inside the mute.

I've experimented with the silencer piping for some time for the maximum amount of silencing and achieved quite a bit. Silencing is quite good.

And it costs much much less if you have a 3d printer and a little electronic assembly skill.

Step 2: 3D Printing

I've designed the parts on solidworks and printed them with an Up-Printer.

for downloading the STL files http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:820990

Step 3: Electronics

I've used a boost converter I bought from ebay to convert the 1.5v of the battery into 5-6V for the amplifier.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1pcs-DC-DC-Converter-Step-...

and used a simple amplifier circuit I've found on the internet.

Assembled the circuit onto multi-hole prototyping board and installed it in into the 3d printed body by using the necessary details, screw holes etc for this installation are modeled in the 3d printed parts.

Step 4: Test

Wired everything to test if they work ok or not. Just noticed that every hole between the outer world from the inside of the silencer needs to be covered to achieve max silencing. Silicon glue just work fine for that.

By using a better amplifier circuit I guess a better result can be obtained. After spending days on designing the piping details, I didn't spend much time on experimenting with the amplifier. I think my amplifier is a bit too simple, well it works, but could be better :D

Step 5: The Final Product.

Here is the finished product. It works. Although not as good as the Yamaha's product. But Yamaha sells it for around 200+ dollars and mine costs err, what? 10dollars?