Easy Lego IPod Speaker for Less Than 2 $ !

My sister wanted some speakers for her iPod. She showed me speakers she liked. It was some
speakers made with Lego... When I looked at the price...... 25+ bucks for a piece of Lego with some speakers.... I told her I could make a similar thing for ... free or almost... The only difference would be where the speaker would be located... on top instead of the bottom.

Step 1: Before Begining

Here what you will need to do the project :

- Lego block (will contain speakers) ( I took a 8 x 2 x thick lego block) - Found in my closet
- Lego block (will act as the back plate) ( 8 x 2 x thin) - Also found in my closet.
- 2 small speakers - I ordered 2 samples from Project Unlimited (Part number AS01508MR-R)
- Headphone jack (1/8") - Old one from a extension cable
- Hot glue
- Soldering Iron, Vacuum plunger, solder
- Dremel tool
- Needle-nose pliers, wire cutter, cable stripper
- Wires (you could use so telephone wires, would get the job done)
- Safety Glasses Important !!!!
- Spare time
- Patience

Optional:
- Multimeter/Continuity tester

Cost of this project : .... 0 $ USD... which is also 0 $ CND or 0 euro... God I like 0. As I said earlier, I found my Lego block in my closet.... I had an old extension cable for the audio jack and I ordered sample speakers... so, every components were free... :)

But, I guess if you didn't have an audio jack... this could add up... 1 or 2 bucks... or 10 minutes of hard-looking in you house to find a broken pair of headphones.

Step 2: Modding the Lego Block

If you want to put some speakers in the Lego block... you'll obviously need to remove the plastic inside the block. I used the Dremel tool to do that.... and it wasn't hard, but it took me maybe ... 30 minutes to do it right. You just need to take your time, find a bit you are comfortable to work with and then, you are ready dremel the piece.

Warning : Make sure you open doors when you do this step. Burnt plastic smells bad !!!!! Also, be sure to wear safety glasses when you are doing it. Some hot plastic pieces could jump into your eyes.

Step 3: Fitting Speakers in Lego Block

The dimension of the inside of my Lego block is 60 mm long x 13 mm wide x 8 mm deep. The diameter of my speakers is 15 mm.... 15 mm is wider than 13 mm... 15 mm won't fit in a 13 mm place. Well... I had to dremel 1 mm on both sides of the round speaker... it was so a tight fit that I don't need any sort of glue to hold the speakers inside the Lego block... they just don't move by themselves.

Step 4: Audio Jack

Now that you have a nice clean Lego block and that you have put your speakers inside, it's time to understand how we are going to connect our jack to our speakers.

If you kept the wires from the headphone, then this step is pretty useless. Your headphone jack will have 3 wires... Left, Right and Ground. Just make a continuity with each wires with the tip, sleeve and the ring to see what wire is what. If you don't have a continuity tester around you, you can build one easily with 1 led, 1 battery and wires. Continuity tester Instructables Now you just need to solder wires to extend ... the wires.

Now, if you are like me, and your audio jack doesn't have wires, you'll need to solder new wires to the different part of the audio. Just use the continuity tester ... or refer to my picture.

Step 5: Soldering Speakers With Audio Jack.

After soldering wires to the audio jack, it's time to look on speakers. On both speakers, you should have plus (+) and minus (-) signs. ou'll need to connect both minus of speakers together.

So, now you need to carefully solder the white wire to the left channel, the red one to the right channel, and the black one... on either of the speaker's ground. After soldering, try to play some music ! If it doesn't work, check your soldering... your + and - on speakers.

Step 6: Glue Time !

After making sure everything is working, it's time to hot glue in place the jack connector.

Tip : Hot glueing is not like soldering. You can be pretty good at soldering........ but god, hot glueing can be terrible. Well, that's my case. If I could have weld the audio jack onto the piece of plastic, god I would have.

So... plug your glue gun..... wait for it to get hot, place the connector in place... make sure it's flat so it will be flush on the iPod's top. Hot glue's ready...... then hot glue the jack. As you can see on the picture....... I suck at hot glueing things. But, eventually the jack was solid.

After.. it was the time to clear the glue-mess... I took a small wooden stick and my dremel...... and the heat created by the spinning stick would melt the glue and I could remove it easily.

Step 7: Finishing

Now that you have a working, jack-glued, iPod Speakers. it's time to put that back plate on it and close.

From here, you have 2 options :

1. You can hot-glue the back plate to the case itself.

2. You can put the back plat there without any glue.

For mine, I tried to glue the back plate to the case... but it didn't work at all..... I even tried to glue it and use clamps to hold it... but it won't still do it. So now, the back is only snapped on the case. It holds OK... but not hard.


Expansion :

1. Running everything from the dock, just like the real thing. This implies having a huge dock connector, an amplifier chip, and a potentiometer (up or down the volume). Those parts take place in the kinda small lego block.


Thanks all for watching