A Wireless Speaker Made From PCBs

Most electronic devices follow a pretty standard construction convention. You design a circuit board, solder all of your components to that, and then house the circuit board within some sort of enclosure. The enclosure obviously helps to protect the delicate electronics and usually looks nicer than an exposed circuit board. But that doesn’t mean you have to follow that approach. You can use the circuit boards as part of the structure of your device. Ardutronic123 has a tutorial on how to build a wireless speaker that utilizes that technique.

This speaker design functions much in the same way as any other Bluetooth wireless speaker. Simply use your phone to connect to the speaker via Bluetooth, and you can start pumping out tunes. It also has a built-in FM tuner, so you can listen to the radio if your phone battery dies or if you get tired of the music in your library. You can purchase all of the parts necessary for this build for about $15 — and significantly less if you already have some common components lying around. You can either have the circuit boards for this design professionally fabricated, or you can make them yourself.

If you choose to make the circuit boards yourself, the process is pretty standard and there are hundreds of tutorials online that will walk you through it. Essentially, you start with a blank copper circuit board. You mask off your circuit traces, and then place the circuit boards in a bath of etchant (sodium persulfate in this case). That will dissolve away the exposed copper and leave behind your traces. This particular design is built around an ATmega328P microcontroller, while an RDA5807 Bluetooth module is used for the wireless connectivity. During assembly, the six individual circuit boards are soldered together to make the speaker box. If you want a wireless speaker that looks a bit more unique that what you can purchase at Best Buy, this should make for a fun project.