3D Printing At Discovery Charter School – Part 14

December 13, 2011 deelip

By David Lewis

A New Challenge

As the kids learned to use SolidWorks and the Rapman Printer, we looked for a class project for our intrepid learners. Thanks to my co-teacher for the elective, we had a supply of components to build miniature speaker kits for an i-pod or other music device.

The challenge for the kids was to come up with a design that is both buildable and meets some basic acoustic design principles. The kits that Michael provided included a woofer, tweeters, battery pack and an amplifier board.

The first task was to determine the size and shape of the holes for the speakers. The kids learned how to use calipers to get the initial dimensions and then bring those into SolidWorks as ovals of the correct size to fit the individual speakers.

The next challenge was to get some acoustic isolation for the tweeters. The simplest was was to create individual enclosures that cover the tweeters on the back of the face plate and glue them in place with hot melt glue.

Then came some of the additional assembly that required a whole new skill set – soldering! Michael taught The Herd the fundamentals of soldering at a group clinic and everyone had a working setup by the end of the afternoon.

Michael also took the group through testing the circuitry to make sure that there was balanced power to each side of the system and that everything was running as it should. Just look at all those multimeters.