I’ve been discussing a lot of electronics and software stuff in the last time. It’s time to get the hands dirty again. Let’s mill a nice case for the Raspberry Pi + HiFiBerry DAC. This is only a prototype in MDF. For the final version I will use beech wood.
Today I’ve found a project similar to our LoudSnail design. The CNC milling is done a bit different from our project and the speaker will be much larger. Looks like a very interesting project. Check out his Facebook page.
The plan for the LoudSnail has changed – it will be a single-chassis fullrange setup. I will use the excellent Jordan JX92S. This driver is not available from Jordan anymore. But it seems, that the driver is now sold by EAD under the name EAD E100. This is not a cheap driver, but it’s worth the money.
There is still a lot of work to do, but now it should be clear how it should look like:
After about 20 hours of milling, the parts for the first woofer enclosure are finished.
There is still a lot of work to do, but I want to post some pictures of the progress today:
I’ve started with the milling for the new LoudSnail speaker. This is my first CNC project. As expected not everything worked as planned. But in general, the idea seems to work. Milling MDF is an easy job for the CNC machine. But using a 3mm endmill and 0.2mm resolution takes time. Milling the large piece took over one hour. Next time I will try to increase the feed rate to 4800mm/min. This should speed up things a bit.
Many people know the B&W Nautilus. I’ve never listened to those, but I love the design. With modern CNC machines it should be possible to create a similar speaker at home. Here starts the LoudSnail project. I will build a 2-way speaker that is equipped with a 13cm midwoofer and a small 25mm tweeter.
The first challenge: create a spiral base. This is relatively easy. I used a logarithmic spiral for it. Unfortunately FreeCAD has no spiral formulas build in. Therefore I had to write my own Python script to create this spiral. The result looks promising:
A CNC machine looks like overkill, if you want to create only a few loudspeaker enclosures. But if you have more milling in wood or aluminium to do, it is an interesting tool.
After reading some discussions in different CNC forums, the CNC 6040 might be an interesting machine to look at. For sure, there are lots of other interesting machines available. Therefore make sure that you first understand your requirements before selecting a machine.
Everybody is talking about 3D printing today, but there are lots of other cool production tools out there that can
This looks like the ultimate CNC mill to produce your own loudspeakers. It consumes much less space than usual portal mills and can be transported easily. Unfortunately this is only a prototype today. Let’s see if this device will be available for sale in the future. I don’t expect it to be cheap.
The kickstarter project for this high-precision desktop CNC machine has started. It has been designed with PCB prototyping in mind.
You can buy this small desktop CNC mill for less than 500$. I don’t know how this compares to OtherMill. But I guess, it is good enough for PCB prototypes
This company wants to create an automated electronics production robot. The project is in a very early state yet, but the goals look promising.
