Quite dangerous to leave this without an enclosure, since the power supply is on the same PCB, several of the components and solder points carry mains voltage.<p>I'm surprised an outlet as high profile as Make don't at least recommend one, or have any of the usual warnings about high voltage.<p>On a side note, it's no mean feat integrating large through hole components and tiny SMD parts onto the one PCB, normally power supplies are wave soldered while SMD parts need reflow instead, and hence TVs and the like use seperate PCBs. Pin-in-paste[1] is possible, but only with some parts, so maybe they used automated selective soldering[2] instead?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.7pcb.com/blog/the-application-of-the-pin-in-paste-reflow-process.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.7pcb.com/blog/the-application-of-the-pin-in-past...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.nordson.com/en/divisions/select/soldering-processes/selective-vs-wave-soldering" rel="nofollow">https://www.nordson.com/en/divisions/select/soldering-proces...</a>
IKEA seem to be killing it in speaker area these days. Even as Swede, that's kind of unexpected. I guess they saw a market segment where a lot of wood is used (this one's plastic though), and there were high margins for the premium products and then decided to go for it.<p>There's obviously a great deal of outsourcing to chinese and taiwanese manufacturers going on here, but they seem to be very competent in the customer role.<p>I love my IKEA Eneby BT speaker from last year. (This one, with the add-on battery: <a href="https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00357636/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00357636/</a>)<p>I would love for IKEA to go into the standalone analogue speaker segment with a fantastic living room speaker, just to piss off those (often) European and quite pretentious speaker brands. Take on B&W and the likes!
This is cool! I wonder if you connected just one of the audio outputs to a speaker with a crossover, the system would adjust to put the whole frequency range through it?<p>It may also be that there's somewhere on the pcb you can tap into line level full frequency audio (or maybe not - they could easily do the filtering only in the digital domain)<p>One thing to keep in mind when doing this is the impedance of the speakers.<p>I'd measure the resistance across the IKEA ones and whatever speakers you're using first. It may be that the IKEA ones are not the common 8 ohms. If they're more (eg 16 ohms) there's a risk that an 8 ohm speaker will result in too much current through the amplifier.
Fun fact: the author of this piece, Ben Hobby, is the son of David Hobby, the photographer who maintains Strobing, one of the best blogs on off camera lighting: <a href="https://strobist.blogspot.com/?m=1" rel="nofollow">https://strobist.blogspot.com/?m=1</a>
Most wireless speakers released nowadays have a digital EQ to compensate for differences in frequency response to simulate accuracy. However the fact that this EQ is now being utilized on a different set of speakers makes this build far from "high quality".
There's very little chance that the crossover filter topology, as well as any biquads in either bandpass are appropriate for a two way loudspeaker other than the original.<p>Solid looking unit from the teardown, I might have to get one...
This is really awesome! Is there any issues with the mismatch of inductive resistance/impedance of the bookshelf speaker vs the original speakers? I would imagine the board is designed for a very specific ohm range.
It looks so much of an overkill on the digital side. A fully fledged SoC with PCI Express and standalone WiFi NIC just to do network, and audio decode?<p>Chinese factories make such Internet radios on $2 Espressif or Realtek microcontrollers.
Wasn't SONOS already exposed for being a CIA front?
Like streaming the audio encrypted to a receiver station.
I would have expected the hacker looking into this instead.
I find it odd to have a hacker project that connects to a proprietary ecosystem (Sonos). In general, I'm disappointed that Ikea went with Sonos, it's not very "people and planet" to be dependent on one company and app to enable different sound ecosystems, without even a Bluetooth option.