A 3DPrinted Speaker Box

When we decided in our school tech club to pull all the components out of a desktop computer and mount them on the wall (post on that coming soon), we didn't really expect this to turn into a 3D Printing project. But without the computer case, turns out there are lots of parts which need a home - and a few custom things where 3D Printing came in handy.

The Problem

Besides the Power Button (which resulted in the Big Red Button) and the custom brackets to hold all the main components, it turned out we also had an orphan speaker which needed a home. Sure, we could have just hot-glued the speaker to the board - but #3DPrinting a custom solution seemed like much more fun. We decided to craft a 3D model of a small box to hold the little speaker.

The Model

The design is quite simple, and the main challenge was to line up the screw holes with those already on the speaker component itself. 

Once we got that done on the bottom part of the case, we replicated it to make the top and cut holes in the top to let the speaker sound come through. We also added a couple of mounting parts for screws modeled after those we used on the Big Red Button.

The Result

We're quite happy with this small part of our larger project. The slots which let the sound escape are little less clean looking than we had hoped, so next time (yeah, right, I'm sure we'll do this again) we'll likely make those a bit wider and do more cleanup on them. The screw holes took one iteration to get aligned right, but once they were aligned, they worked really well. The slot on the side to allow the wires to enter the box was a good plan and don't detract from the aesthetic of the box at all. The mounting brackets for the screws also worked well.