SONIC SOUND SPEAKER

This project was part of a second-year module in Loughborough Design School. This project involved the designing and manufacturing of a working speaker that was controlled by an ultrasonic distance sensor.

The further that you stand away from the speaker the louder the music will play. As the user walks closer to the speaker the music will then go quieter.

This was a 6 week long project in conjunction with one of my course mates. The speaker internals were re-purposed from an old set of speaker with the other electronic components purchased externally.

The internal electronics were then soldered together into a circuit and fitted into the 3D printed body of the speaker. The volume dial was controlled internally using a stepper motor. The stepper motor was controlled from the ultrasonic distance sensor which told the motor which way to turn and by how many increments.

Due to the huge area of detection on the ultrasonic distance sensor it was difficult to control the volume by standing in front of the speaker. To solve this and to demonstrate the speaker working, a large piece of MDF was used as the detector for the sensor. This can be seen in one of the videos at the bottom of this page.

The speaker was able to be plugged into a laptop or mobile phone to play the music through it. The working product was then demonstrated to our module leaders as part of our electronics coursework.

On top of the speaker there is an LCD that tells the user the level of the volume. All of the electronic components were coded in C using MPLAB and programmed using a PICkit3. Custom volume characters were designed and coded onto the LCD screen. An acrylic layer was placed on top of the speaker to protect the LCD screen.

Videos of the project in use can be seen below.