Jewelry Box + Audio Earrings

For my final project, I created audio earrings and a jewelry box to hold them in. The audio earrings are the same shape as the waveform of a specific word or phrase from a song. For example, one of my favorite songs is Written All Over Your Face by Louis Tomlinson, so I converted that song into its waveform and took a small clip of that to convert into an earring. The overall concept of my project is that each set of earrings would be a different word from a different song and you can pick which earring you want to wear based on your mood that day. Additionally, you can mix and match earrings to make your own song for the day!

Laser Cutter

3D printer - Ender Pro 3 and Prusa

Plywood

White PLA

Earring Hooks

Fusion 360

Ultimaker Cura Software

GIMP

MP3 Audio to Waveform Converter

The box I created was designed in fusion 360. I used a similar approach to what we learned in class about press-fit designs and created finger joints to connect the box. I found some simple hinge examples online and implemented that into my design as well so I could add a lid.

For the hinge itself, I drew a small square that would be the same size as the extruded square on the sides of the lid that would eventually fit into the hinge. Then I drew a circle around the square and a slightly larger circle around that one. I extruded the portion between the two circles and that's what made the hinge. As you can see in the image, the square size was 5mm x 5mm, so I made the 2 notches on the sides of the lid the same size.

Once the pieces were ready, I quickly made test pieces to make sure all the dimensions and interacting sides were correct and started laser cutting!

The test pieces fit nicely with each other, so I proceeded to laser cut the main pieces.

After the first iteration, I realized that my left and right panels weren't big enough because I didn't take into consideration the notch sizes. I also realized that the lid I printed had material behind the notches, and when I tried assembling the box, the lid wouldn't open all the way since that extra material kept hitting the back wall. Thus, I had to basically move the notches to the end of the lid and re-cut the piece. However, I didn't remove that extra material from the front of the lid, so now my box has some extra material on the lid past the front wall. Although that doesn't affect the box itself, it's something I would fix in a future iteration of the box. Finally, these issues could have been eliminated completely if I built the model in 3D in Fusion 360 so that I can see how the parts would fit together right in the software rather than after printing them.

Another issue I ran into while printing was that the kerf I used was not large enough. I used 0.2mm which eventually ended up being fine, but it took a lot of effort with the rubber mallet and some of the wood on the notches chipped off as well.

When researching various forms of audio earrings, I came across this Instructables document, which I followed when creating my own earrings.

I already had an MP3 file of my song of choice downloaded, so I went straight to the processing step of the documentation. Before I could even start, though, I ran into issues with the software. I wasn't able to load the files correctly, and since the documentation and software were from 2014, there was not much documentation or resources to provide troubleshooting help. This is the software they used to convert the MP3 file to the waveform, so I started looking for other online resources to do the task. I eventually found this online MP3 to waveform converter and used that for the remainder of the project.

Once I got the waveform image, I imported that into GIMP for further processing. I started by cropping a small section of the waveform that would correspond to my earring. Then I used the 'fuzzy select tool' to select the black waveform area of the image. Then I made a path and exported the path as a .svg file. Selecting the black area, however, caused some issues in Fusion 360. During my second iteration with a different song, I tried selecting the white area when creating my earring, and that surprisingly fixed the issue. I had to reorient the design in Fusion 360 but overall it was much easier than the other fix that I'll explain below.

Once I had the .svg file, I imported it into a base sketch in Fusion 360. I started by taking the sketch and revolving it around the x-axis. This is where I initially ran into issues. The first time I revolved it, each portion of the waveform was separated even when I tried selecting all the pieces of the sketch together to revolve it. This happened when I selected the black area of the waveform in GIMP. My initial solution was to create a new sketch and add a rod through the middle. this did end up working and is what I used in my final design. However, when I started designing a new earring from a different song, I accidentally selected the white portion of the waveform on GIMP. This surprisingly fixed my problem of the separate sections. I had to reorient the design a little bit but did not have to add a rod in this one as the revolving created one solid piece. Due to time constraints I was not able to print this one, but I'm glad to have figured out an easy solution to the issue. After revolving the sketch, I added the half-circle on the side of the model for the earring hook to go around. Then I scaled the design to make it roughly 25mm so that it wasn't a super long earring.

When printing the earrings, I went through 4 iterations, each which had a different orientation or support.

Iteration #1:

• Printer: Ender Pro 3
• Orientation: Horizontal
• Supports: normal, zig zag
• Results: the quality of the print was really bad and there were a lot of artifacts on the earring

Iteration #2:

• Printer: Prusa
• Orientation: Horizontal
• Supports: normal, zig zag
• Results: pretty good results overall! This print gave me the final version of the earrings for this project. There were of course still some artifacts and other improvements could be made, but in general this was a great print.

Iteration #3:

• Printer: Prusa
• Orientation: Vertical
• Supports: None
• Results: the earring completely deformed part-way throughout the print, so this iteration was unsuccessful.

Iteration #4:

• Printer: Prusa
• Orientation: Vertical
• Supports: Line Supports
• Results: this earring also completely deformed part-way throughout the print, so this iteration was unsuccessful as well.

Overall, although only one iteration worked, I learned a lot about the process of trying different printers and different supports, so this experience was very valuable.

There are definitely many ways these designs can be improved in the future, so I will discuss some of my ideas for future work.

For the jewelry box, I would like to improve the design of the box to make it more like a music box both stylistically and functionally. I could incorporate a CAM design to make the lid open from a lever of some sort. I would also want to either paint or score the box to make it look nicer.

I am also considering adding labeled compartments into the box to separate the earrings. This will help them not get mixed up as they'll all look pretty similar to each other.

Finally, I would reduce the extra material at the front of the lid like I mentioned earlier.

For the earrings, I would like to make more earrings with different songs or phrases to create a full collection. I would also like to print with different colors of PLA based on the mood of the song or phrase. Another idea was to create necklaces to match the earrings so that I'd have a full set of jewelry.

I am also interested in printing on different machines like the Ultimaker to see how the quality changes and how the need of supports change too. I would also want to try using water-soluble supports to reduce the amount of artifacts that get left on the piece after printing.