3D printing services company Proto3000 recently posted a video showcasing one their designers custom-creating a slick, portable speaker using a 3D printed casing and pre-existing speaker components.
The speaker project starts with some basic portable speaker parts and a simple speaker motherboard. Components like these are pretty easy to come by if you wanted to try your hand at making a set for yourself, and you can probably even scavenge most of the parts you need from outdated or thrifted electronics. The parts Proto3000 selected feature a USB charger, volume control, an on/off switch and audio in/outputs, so the 3D modelled housing needed to make allowances for each of them.
The housing was created with CAD software and has a really simple and clean design, although personally I would have used more interesting colors. But the beauty of 3D printing is you can print anything that you want in any color that you want. Once the CAD model was completed, it was 3D printed on a MakerBot Replicator. The designer then simply needed to wire the parts together, glue the 3D printed parts in place and plug it in.
Granted, I’m sure there is a little bit more to it than that. Proto3000 does offer rapid prototyping services as diverse as 3D printing, 3D laser scanning, reverse engineering, 3D design, CMM inspection and CAD services, so creating a set of portable speakers from scratch is going to be pretty easy for them.
You can watch the video of the speakers being designed, 3D printed and assembled here:
Unfortunately Proto3000 did not include the digital files when they posted their video so you can’t print the speaker housing shown here for yourself. But if you’ve designed and built a few 3D printed objects before, this project really shouldn’t be that hard to replicate. Just make sure you pick some nicer colors.
