UPDATE: I finally posted my Instructable on how to make these speakers for yourself. You can link to it by clicking here
Well, I feel pretty good about this one. I could hardly sleep last night at 2:30am when I finished this. I was too giddy. I really wanted to test it out to make sure it was going to work.
On Friday I had the idea. I was thinking about the christmas in July party and how it was such a pain to not only wire up the lights but also the speakers. So, I went about searching for wireless speakers and I found these ones made by Rocketfish. Suddenly the idea hit me. I can’t remember where I first saw it, perhaps the MAKE blog, but on the internet I came across an image of this speaker sphere. Somebody had taken two red salad bowls and installed numerous speakers around it. I always thought it was a great idea for a party. I decided it was time for me to do something similar.
It’s amazing how this one came together. It’s almost as if I saw how it was going to go down before I even collected the stuff. On Friday night, (Day 139) I ran by Best Buy and picked up two sets of the RocketFish wireless speakers. Then, I went off to ikea and searched out their bowl selection. It was serendipity that these birch bowls were available and I knew instantly they were going to be my speaker housing. Then, off to the hardware store for the materials I’d need to make this little conversion. The smartest thing I did there was I would head into the hardware store and get what I thought I’d needed. Then I’d go to the car and start dismantling the speaker. When I’d reach an obstacle all I had to do was get out of the car and fetch the right tool for the job.
Last night (Day 140) I assembled it all together. I was lucky because my worst fear was that I’d go into my studio and start the project and realize that I was missing something, ruining my chance to post something finished the next day. Initially, it was my thought that I would cut out the 8 C battery holder from the original plastic RocketFish housing. I had gotten a cheap weller soldering iron in order to do some hot knife-style plastic cutting. I wasted an hour trying to cut out the battery holder and hadn’t really gotten anywhere. That’s when I realized that C batteries are 1.5V just like AA baterries and luckily from my Cold Cathode tube project I had a few 8 AA battery holders laying around. So, opted for the AA over the C. I also plan to ultimately do a little sanding around the speaker holes or perhaps some rubber edging in order to hide the jagged wood from the speaker hole cuts.
This wasn’t a cheap project mainly due to the cost of the wireless speakers but it was completely worth it now that I have these cool modern speaker spheres of my own design.
I still have another speaker to make and I’ll probably get that done in the next few days. Now that the first one is built its really quite simple and fast to do the conversion. So, next time I will try to take more pictures of the process and make a little PDF listing the tools needed and steps taken for you to do this yourself.
All in all, I’m very happy. I’m listening to it now. I’m looking forward to showing these off at the christmas party!
Shut up! These are crazy awesome! Does the sound come out both sides of the bowl?
Yep. It either side can be set to left or right or mono.
Sweet dude
looks really awesome!
Thanks guys!
excellent work. consider this idea stolen.
SUPER impressive!
Simply great!
But maybe in Version 2.0 no clamp-thing as it disturbs the almost perfect shape a bit ;-)
Ideally you need to isolate the two sides of your speaker array otherwise the two speakers will be cancelling each other out, ruining the sound. The simplest solution would be to place a circle of MDF between the two salad bowls effectively turning them into two separate speakers in one unit.
Oh, I didn’t know that. Thank you for the advice. That shouldn’t be a very tough alteration. Thanks for the comments everybody!
Brilliant! I love those!
I WANT. How much can I pay you to do a pair for me? So great looking!
Hi Lesley, Wow. well, I am nearing completion of the instructable which would show you how to do the conversion yourself but if you’d like me to make you a couple feel free to send me an email (charlie@theb-roll.com) and we can discuss. Thanks.
Tasty
Which diameter bowls did you use?
12, 20, or 28 cm?
Even if I can’t spring for the wireless speaker system these would still look great, maybe with some thing like a buddha box inside them?
Thanks! I used the largest ones they had. The other two sizes were definitely too small for the rocketfish speakers. The buddha box is a great idea actually and I bet you could fit that into the 20cm ones no problem. Makes me think of the MFOS weird sound generator. That would also be a cool kit to convert to spheroid housing. Thanks for the comment!