My Final Project!

What i was designing for?

I was really designing for myself with this project. I had some really nice speakers and, as a RA this summer, I was always had a bunch of kids in my room and on my computer. The problem was I couldn't control these speakers remotely so that was the problem i set out to fix it.  I wanted to make a bluetooth enabled box that i could plug into any speaker and control  from my phone I started with making an enclosure to hold the tech i needed. 
     Creating the enclosure got off to a really poor start. Solidworks was confusing and unfriendly and illustrator was only false hope. After a hopelessly misproportioned box, i finally got the design down and created the enclosure which took about a day. Designing wasn't too time consuming and it was fun but the laser cut itself took forever with the intricate designs.    

     The really fun part was designing the buttons. I used the scraps of my wood to make a little lattice structure to reinforce the buttons i glued to the buttons i had laser cut. It actually came out really nice.

     The chip i used was an RN-52 with a breakout board from Sparkfun. It came surprisingly plug and play. I just had to connect an arduino's 3.3V to it and a series of buttons to its GPIO pins and it would work. You hook up ground to ground and 3.3 to 3.3 and PWR enabled on the RN-52 chip and it boot up when the arduino booted up. I hit two bumps in the road with that though.

     The first problem was with the arduino i tried. It turned out to actually be broken. It was only supplying half the necessary voltage which took hours to finally find out. I figured there was something wrong the circuit i made or with the bluetooth chip. The button making and assembling box took about half a day.

     The second problem was the mode needed for the buttons to work had to be activated over a serial connection through a USB hardware piece which i never bought because i was positive i could connect with my arduino. After swapping out the broken arduino, i spent fruitless hours connecting and troubleshooting connections to ultimate failure. I could never get the necessary connection. The most i saw from the bluetooth chip through my arduino was a weird Y with two dots above it. So the system i made for my buttons was useless. That was more than a little heartbreaking. I ordered the necessary piece but it won't arrive until after presentations. 
     However, this wasn't too much of a problem for the ultimate purpose of the device. I had the chip powered and connectable, and it was able to stream music. So while i hadn't fully completed what i had designed, it still covered what i needed. And now i had a bunch of open space in the box so i repurposed it. I put in a false bottom to cover the electronics and it became a nice place to hold my pens, pencils, and all the  miscellaneous stuff i had on my desk. I had to cannibalize a cardboad box to cut out a bottom and supports for it to fit in my box.  


Here are a bunch of pictures of the process!