Need New Headphones? Make Your Own Pair From Raw Materials
Davide Marin shows how to design a set of personalized headphones with 3D printing, magnets, and homemade coils.
Often when someone discusses “building a speaker” for a car or home theater, generally this means creating the enclosure, or box, while the magnet and vibrating membrane are purchased. In reality though, it’s quite possible to make your own speakers from scratch, and Davide Marin created his own in a 3D-printed pair that can be worn as headphones.
As explained in Marin's project write-up, all that’s really needed to craft a speaker is a coil, magnet, and floating membrane. Either the magnet or the coil is attached to the membrane, while the corresponding component is attached to a fixed point, quickly varying the force in order to produce audio frequencies.
If you want to try this as an experiment — though perhaps not as something you’d want to use on a regular basis — he outlines how to do this as a “PoorMan™ version of the DIY Speaker,” with items that you’ll find around the house like a letter window and pen. You may need to purchase a length of 0.1mm copper wire, magnets, and an audio jack, but with a bit of hacking and coil winding, you can have your own speaker in an afternoon.
For a more refined version, he modeled headphones and printed them out with an STL printer, with the coil attached to the membrane, and magnets on the fixed position. To make the headphones look cooler, he printed things out in glow-in-the-dark resin, electroplated sporting material, and even got his friend to design a skull-themed shell for them.
See them in action in the clip below!
