Tunes With Fire

 

One thing that I've noticed in recent times is that there are a lot of electronic gizmos out there that try to jam a lot of gimmicks into a single device.  A lot of those gimmicks I find to be a bit on the tacky side and really don't add any real improvement on the prime purpose of the device. 

I think a lot of that stems back to my university days when I took a course on human interface design (granted it's a bit of an obscure subject, but I did find pretty fascinating). In broad strokes, the main take away I took from the course was that more the "stuff" you cram into something, the more unusable it becomes for a human to operates it. Back in the day, the prime suspect of this crime was the lowly clock radio that tended to have many, many buttons that control things that aren't related to the function of keeping time and waking you up. Sadly, considering that I still have difficulty in finding the snooze button in the morning, this is still very true today. 

So it's safe to say, I don't tend to pay much attention to the noise that emanates from the electronics section of your typical discount department store, but for some strange reason, this caught my eye. 

Fireplace Bluetooth Speaker

On the surface it's basically just another Bluetooth speaker, but what really caught my attention was the "fireplace" feature - yes, another gimmick, but I was actually always a bit curious on how the fire place effect was accomplished, considering that those electric fireplaces you find in homes are a popular item these days, I always wondered how this effect was done and I always wanted to try and recreate that effect on a future project.

So, I popped it into the cart and brought it home. 

Box Contents

Getting it home and opening up the box I found the usual stuff that you would expect (Aux and USB cables, a small manual and the speaker itself). The speaker appears to be made of the sort of cheap plastic that I would would fully expect from something like this. 

 Flipping over the back showed the specs of the unit

Speaker Specifications

Looking at the back of the speaker, I confirmed the suspected country of origin, along with a good assortment of certification labels. But one thing that did leap out at me was the power output of the speaker.  Five watts is actually pretty impressive for something like this, whether that it is accurate we won't be able to confirm until we get inside. 

We got this far, how does it sound?  How about does the "fire place" look? 

On the whole it's OK - I wasn't keen on it being defaulted at full volume on start up, but it's about what I would have expected for an inexpensive Bluetooth speaker, but that wasn't what I bought the speaker for.  The fire effect is basically what I was looking for and definitely looks like what an electrical fireplace would look like. 

So, let's open the hood and take a look inside. 

Opening the Hood

My goal with this exercise is to not destroy the speaker, but rather just to take a look to see how it was put together. 

Off the bat, I'm actually pretty impressed on the design of this thing.  Normally I would have expected the back to be glued in place, requiring a "cut job" (and wrecking my goal of not destroying the thing), or one of those proprietary screws for which no screw driver exists. Instead the back was secured with some good old Philips screws. 

Philips screws!

Once the screws were removed the back was easily opened to expose its secrets.

The secrets within

The first thing I noticed that the speaker was stamped as a 5 watt speaker, so that's a good start 

5 Watt Speaker

Next I also noticed that the front of the speaker was basically a translucent piece of orange acrylic that was textured, most likely used to help with the flame illusion. 

Orange Acrylic

At the bottom of the speaker, there was an opening in the acrylic with a series of orange LED's that were of the steady burn variety (personally I was kind of expecting them to flicker since I know you can get LED's that simulate a  candle/flame effect).

Orange LEDs

Now what really struck me was that the flame effect was actually accomplished by a fairly simple mechanical means in the form of an electric motor that was geared to turn at a slow speed. The motor itself was connected to a shaft on which had what I can only describe as shredded tinfoil attached to it.

"Shredded Tinfoil"

The flame effect was accomplished when the motor spun the tinfoil, which in turn reflected the light from the LED's casting the light on the back of the acrylic sheet

That basically explained how we get "fire" and I have pretty good reason to assume that this is also the same approach that's used in those home fireplaces. 

With that sorted out, I took a look at the brains of the operation. 

Bluetooth Speaker Circuit

At first glance, it's a pretty basic circuit board and it's got the type of features that I would expect including a SD card slot, power switch and the standard USB and aux ports.   

One thing that really impressed me though was that the wiring connections were connected by sockets on to the circuit board, which actually makes any future repairs or upgrades very easy since it's literally a plug and play solution. Usually in something made at this particular price point, I would have fully expected the wiring to be directly soldered. 

At a high level, it looks like everything is being run by 4 chips. To a get a better sense on how things were put together, I took a look at the individual chips to see what they did. 

Basically each chip handled one key function of the speaker. 

The main chip in the board is the brain that reads and decodes the Bluetooth signal.

Bluetooth Chip

Another chip drives the audio output to the speaker, looking up the specs on this chip indicated that it was rated for 5 watts output - so the speaker is really and truly putting out 5 watts of power, so I was quite pleased to see that the manufacturer was not misleading us.

 

Audio Amplifier Chip

 Of course we need a voltage regulator to make sure nothing bad happens to the various electronic bits. We don't want to release any magic smoke after all. 

Voltage Regulator

And of course we want to make sure that we can keep the lithium battery properly charged to make sure that the fire in the speaker stays fake.

Lithium Battery Charger Chip

So it is really a pretty simple circuit which makes sense. but like I said earlier I did notice that there are some really nice touches in the overall design that would make this speaker pretty easy to hack into something else.  

But for now I carefully put things back together and played some tunes. 

With that, a purely impulse buy became a learning experience wrapped up in something that I could modify into something different if I ever get tired of listening to tunes. 

By the way - the song I played is "Scarlet Fire" by Otis McDonald  - Thanks to DankPods to putting him on my radar (though I didn't blow up my speaker like he typically does!)