Before I even started my first electronics project ever around 2017 (at age 16-17), I already had an idea on my mind: I wanted to build my own Bluetooth speaker someday.
Why? I’m not sure myself. Maybe it was just a naive ambition of a curious teenager, maybe I just wanted to look cool at parties as “the guy who built his own speaker”, or maybe there was something else that interested me about them.
As I was starting out with no real electronics experience and very limited knowledge, the idea of building an entire speaker by myself seemed nearly unattainable.
I would have probably been able to make something by buying and chaining together pre-built modules (battery management, Bluetooth receiver, amplifier, etc.) – but this approach, while quite popular in beginner DIY/maker spaces, has never felt appealing to me. It just felt like it wouldn’t really be my project, but just an amalgamation of others’ (commercial) projects.
Therefore, I put the idea aside, though it never left my head entirely.
Eventually, in 2019, I felt ready to try my luck at actually building such a speaker, from the ground up. And thus, the BlockBox project was born.
Looking back, I was still naive and clueless about a lot of the intricacies involved, but despite that, I feel it would be wrong to call the project anything but successful.
Start here to read the full story of the BlockBox project.
