Mini Speakers for Magic Mirror

I had an old PC monitor laying around at home. I was wondering what for I can use it. Finally I decided to make a Magic mirror based on it and Raspberry Pi, which I also had available. You can find a lot of such projects in this site, so I will not go deep in its design. To supply the Raspberry Pi and the other needed devices I have opened the monitor and found that its Power supply unit produces 5V/ 3.5A voltage. I soldered two cables on its output and routed them outside the monitor shield. On them I soldered two micro USB cables used for the supply of the Raspberry Pi and other parts. There I soldered also a two pin cable connector

The monitor has two video inputs - DVI and VGA. As you know the Raspberry Pi output is HDMI. I had available HDMI to VGA adapter, which I decided to integrate in the project. This adapter can provide also audio signal extracted from the HDMI port. The Raspberry PI by default sends the audio signal through the HDMI port. Based on these given, I decided to ad an audio feature to my Magic mirror project. This Instructable describes the design of the audio speakers used for this purpose.

All parts used can be sourced from Aliexpress.

I used :

• small PAM8403 stereo audio amplifier module
• two 2W small speakers
• two plastic project boxes
• 3.5" audio jack
• different cables - one for the input signal is shielded two wire cable
• 4 Rubber Grommets
• two pin cable connector

For making of the holes of the speakers I used a step drill bit - such you can find for cheap in Aliexpress.

First I marked the center of the boxes, I did a small initial hole using a hand awl, and then I continued slowly with the step drill bit.

To fix the speakers I used a hot glue gun

For my purpose I needed two speakers. I decided to make one of the fully passive - only a speaker is paced in it, The other one should be the active one - it should contain not only the speaker, but also the audio amplifier.

For the passive speaker I drilled only one hole on the side wall of the box - for the speaker cable. On the side wall of the active speaker I drilled three holes :

1. For the passive speaker cable
2. Fort the input signal cable
3. For the power supply cables

On all holes I put a rubber grommets and passed the cable through them

In the active speaker I fixed the power amplifier using again the hot glue gun. After that I closed the boxes with their covers.

To fix the speakers at the back of the monitor used for the magic mirror I used double sided glue tape.

On the last picture you can see how the whole system is looking like (here I still miss the VGA cable, which I ordered, but in the time of writing of this article did not come). On the video you can see the test of the speakers supplied by the monitors power supply unit and receiving the audio signal from my Sony MP3 player.