The Speaker

Last week, I ordered all the components, and they all arrived today.

Honestly, I was going to make the lights first, but I’m kinda scared of working with high voltage, so I just went with the speaker first (honestly, it's more interesting too).

The plan was pretty simple: an ESP32-S3, a MAX98357A amplifier, and a replacement speaker driver for the JBL Go 3. Put them together, stream audio over Wi-Fi, and hopefully end up with something that actually sounds like a speaker.

The ESP32 handles the networking and audio streaming, while the amplifier takes care of driving the speaker. I wanted Wi-Fi streaming rather than Bluetooth because, well, I already have Wi-Fi everywhere, and it makes the speaker a little more interesting to build.

The first thing I noticed was that the speaker driver sounded terrible without an enclosure. Extremely shrill, almost painful to listen to. Which was a little concerning, considering I had just bought it specifically to make a speaker.

Turns out, though, that the enclosure matters a lot more than I initially expected. A speaker driver isn't really designed to sound good sitting on a desk by itself. The enclosure changes how the air behind the diaphragm behaves, and without one, the sound can be pretty underwhelming. So I'll probably spend some time designing and 3D-printing one.

For now, though, the basic setup works. I can stream audio over Wi-Fi and get sound out of a speaker that I assembled myself. It's not particularly impressive as a standalone product yet, but that's kind of the point.

Next, I am going to add a microphone so I can control the speaker with voice commands. Eventually, it'll then officially be part of Cadence, alongside the lights and whatever else I end up building.