Battery holderSpeaker held tightly in placeDerivate speaker design

Click an image see a larger version; more photos are on Flickr.

Variations

Left: audioJar by Sarah Pease. Right: owl speakers by Jon Moeller.

Fab Speakers

These portable speakers are made from laser-cut wood, fabric, veneer, and electronics. They are powered by three AAA batteries and compatible with any standard audio jack (e.g. on an iPhone, iPod, or laptop).

The speakers are an experiment in open-source hardware applied to consumer electronics. By making their original design files freely available online, in a way that's easy for others to modify, I hope to encourage people to make and modify them. In particular, I'd love to see changes or additions that I didn't think about and to have those changes shared publicly for others to use or continue to modify. The speakers have been designed to be relatively simple and cheap in the hopes of facilitating their production by others.

Publication

David A. Mellis and Leah Buechley. 2012. Case studies in the personal fabrication of electronic products. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 268-277.