Cup Speaker

What I did

For this project, we were asked to construct a simple speaker using only a handful of common items.

 

What I used

Materials: a spool of magnetic wire, 4 cylindrical magnets, 1 plastic cup

Tools: glue gun, diagonal cutters, small pvc pipe, sandpaper, audio cable with alligator clips

 

How I did it

I started the project by taking magnetic wire and winding it around a small pvc pipe about 15 times. I then cut the wire using diagonal cutters, and wrapped the end of the wire around the coil to secure it, leaving a couple centimeters of wire extending off the coil on both ends. Then I removed the coil from the pvc pipe.

 

 

Next I used a piece of sandpaper to sand the coating off both ends of the wire, leaving about 1 cm exposed on each side.

 

Next, I used a hot glue gun to attach the coil to the bottom of the cup.

 

 

Next, I took four magnets, and put two on the bottom of the cup, in the center of the coil. I then held those two magnets in place and dropping the other two into the cup, allowing them to snap into place.

    

 

Finally, I attached an audio cable to the magnetic wire by attaching one alligator clip to each end of the wire. Then I was able to plug the audio cable into my phone and hear audio from my phone when I held the cup up to my ear.

 

What I learned

Prior to starting this project, we learned about various hand tools and how to protect yourself from injury while using them. From this I learned that there are a lot of ways to maim yourself, and that it’s very important to follow proper safety protocol. However, despite learning that we should wear safety glasses whenever we’re using hand tools, we were all too reluctant to use them when we were cutting the magnetic wire with the diagonal cutters. It seems that even when you know what the right thing to do to keep yourself safe is, it can be difficult to make the choice to protect yourself. In the future, I’ll have to make sure I don’t allow potential embarrassment or perceived hassle to prevent me from taking the proper safety precautions.

I also learned how important it is not to only document your work with photographs, but with notes as well. When writing up this documentation, I was unsure about the proper names for some things or the exact measurements of some of my materials and tools. Knowing this would make my documentation much more thorough and useful for future readers.