Mini

BoomBeastic Mini build guide

Parts list

See here for a list of the parts you'll need.

NB: Make sure you use an official power supply with at least 2.5A. Poor power supply will directly affect the Boombeastic's functionality.

Tools

The only tools you'll need are i) a soldering iron; ii) a screwdriver and optionally, iii) a wire stripper. Scissors or a cutter might also come in handy (for step 2c)

Assembly

Before you start

The Boombeastic is made of 8 wooden frames: back, front, and 6 in between. The inside frames have numbers in the top left corner going from 1 to 5, the one without a number should be number 6.

The assembly order will be the following (presuming you're stacking the plates onto a surface): 1) Backplate, with large rectangular gap at the bottom, and the 3 close holes in the top right corner. 2) Layers 1-6, so that the number faces up, on the top left 3) Frontplate, with print towards you, and large rectangular gap at bottom.

Step 1. Solder everything

Get your soldering iron ready, as we're about to solder our parts.

1.a Solder amp breakout to terminal

• Grab the amp breakout along with the screw terminal block and the pins which came with it. (See the image at the start if you're unsure what these are.)

• Orient the amp breakout so that the star and + and - icons are facing towards you.

• Place the terminal block on the amp breakout, so that the short end of the pins fit through the 2 large holes, and the holes on the side of the block face away from the amp breakout.

• Solder the terminal block onto the amp breakout.

• Next, grab the pins. You'll need 7 pins -- the Adafruit set of pins we received came with an extra pin, so we snapped one off the end before soldering.

• Orient the pins so that the longer end is on the same side of the amp breakout as the terminal block. Solder the short ends of the pins onto the amp breakout.

1.b Solder the LED backpack

• Grab the LED backpack and the set of pins that came with it. You'll need just 4 pins, so you might also have to snap off extra pins here

• Solder the pins onto the backpack, so that they are sticking up toward you when you are looking at the chip on the backpack.

• Connect the LED matrix to the LED Backpack. BE SURE TO DO THIS THE CORRECT WAY: Ada fruit instructions

1.c Solder the speaker

• Grab your bi-polar electric wires, and cut to roughly 15 cm in length (this leaves some margin for error, in case you need to redo any soldering later on)

• At each end of the wires, strip off roughly 1 cm from each cable so that the copper threads are exposed. Note: Separate the red and black cables as needed towards the end, eg for a few cm

• Take one end of the wires, and twist the copper threads as much as you can so that there's no loose thread.

• Solder the twisted copper ends onto to the speaker's contact holes, so that the black wire connects onto the negative pole on the speaker, and the red wire onto the positive pole. How: To do this, fill each speaker contact hole with the resepctive copper wires, then bend the cable and solder as much surface of the hole as you can. Make sure the solder fully covers your copper threads.

Step 2: Fasten the parts

2.a Fit the Raspberri Pi

Important: From here on we assume you have already provisioned your Pi and configured your Boombeastic application onto an SD card. If not, do this now: Provision Pi | Configure application

• Grab the backplate. Fit 6 of the small screws to the frame, so that the screw heads are on the outer side of the backplate, and so that the only holes that won’t have screws are the four most outer corners. Put backplate back down, with screws facing towards you.

• Now, grab your Pi. Note: Make sure your SD card is fitted in the Pi.

• Place the Pi onto the backplate, over the four screws near the cutout. Screw on four spacers or nuts to hold it in place. (See image in 2b)

2.b Fit the amp breakout

• Fit the amp breakout over the two screws in the upper right corner of the backplate and fasten using the bolts.

By now, your backplate should look like this:

2.c Fit the LED matrix

• Take the front plate of Boombeastic and fit the LED matrix and backpack in the rectangular slot intended for the LEDs. You'll want the pins to be on the inside, i.e. on the opposite side of the logo, and so that the row of 4 pins is closer to the bottom of the frame. It doesn't really matter if those pins end up on the upper edge, but if they do, you'll just need to be mindful of it when wiring (Step 4).

NB This is a very tight fit. You might find that you'll have to chip away at the edges of the hole using some sharp blade (eg scissor/cutter)

2.d Attach the speaker

• Still on the frontplate, align the speaker over the circular cutout, with the leads facing the closer edge of the back of the faceplate.

Fasten it with your remaining 4 small screws and nuts, so that the heads of the screws are on the outside.

Step 3. Stack the frames

It's time to put our frames in place. Make sure you do this before moving on to the wiring!

For this, place and stack the frames in the following manner:

• On your left, place your front frame, face down, so that the LED backpack is on the top right corner.
• On top of your front frame, place layers 5 and 6, so that the numbers are on top right corner, facing the LED backpack
• Now, grab your backplate, and thread the four long screws in its four corner holes, so that the heads face the outside of the Boombeastic
• While making sure the screws don't fall out, place the backplate down next to the frontplate, to the right, and so that the amp breakout is on the top right corner.
• On top of the back frame, and threading through the screws, stack layers 1-4 (so that the number is on the top left)

Step 4. Wiring

Step 4.a Wire speaker to amp breakout

• Now, wire the speaker to the amp breakout: Twist your copper wires as much as you can, untighten the terminal block screws, fit in the copper wires, and then tighten the screws.

• NB: Remember polarity! The red cable goes to +, and black to -.

4.b Wire LEDs to Pi

• Now, Wire the LED matrix's four pins to the Pi

• From the jumper jerky peel four wires. You can use the wiring diagram to wire the matrix, or the table below.

Important If you use the diagram above as a guide, and placed your LED pins on the upper edge of the frame, note that you should be placing your wires on the LED matrix in the inverted order than the one shown on the diagram (i.e. your purple wire should be on the left, followed by orange, black and then red). If your pins are at the bottom of the matrix, ignore this.

Wiring diagram color	LED Matrix pin	Raspberry Pi pin
red	VCC	2
black	GND	6
orange	SDA	3
violet	SCL	5

4.c Wire amp to Pi

You can use the wiring diagram to wire the amplifier, or this table:

Wiring diagram color	amp breakout pin	Raspberry Pi pin
red	Vin	4
black	GND	14
blue	DIN	40
yellow	BCLK	12
cyan	LRC	35

Note: the GAIN and SD pins on the amp are not connected.

Step 5: Moment of truth

Our Boombeastic is now good to go! Well, in theory at least.

Before we bolt it all up, now is a good time to test that it's working as it should.

Test your lights

First, power up your Pi. Within 30 seconds or so, you should see the LEDs light up, into 3 dots, and a smiley face should appear on the matrix.

That indicates that your Pi is properly provisioned, and the LED matrix is correctly wired.

Troubleshooting:

• Lights don't turn on / are stuck on 3 dots. Open an application container terminal in your device's Resin dashboard, select Host OS -> Main, and execute i2cdetect -y 1 This should return a diagram of your LED wiring, rendered as a matrix of 77 pairs of digits. If the LED backpack is correctly wired, you should see one pair of digits, and 76 pairs of hyphens (--)

(i2c is the protocol through which the Pi talks to the LED matrix. It allows up to 77 or in some cases 154 devices to be wired to a host. Every 2-digit is an address, or a device.)

Example of a result indicating a correctly wired LED backpack:

• Lights form a Wifi-like pattern. This means your device isn't connecting to the Wifi network.

Test your sound

Test your speaker. Play music onto it - is sound coming out? And how is the quality? If the quality is poor, you might have a power issue.

If there is no sound at all, maybe it's a wiring or provisioning issue.

To test for the latter, open an application container terminal in your device's Resin dashboard, select Host OS -> Main, and execute speaker-test -c2 -t wav This should play a handsome voice repeating "Left, right, left, right" -- if not, check your device configuration (To stop the command, type Ctrl C )

Step 6: Close it up

All set? Time to close up your Boombeastic. To do this, take your front layers, and place them onto layers 0-4, threading the four screws through the corner holes.

This may take some work to move the wires so the case can close.

You can bend the pins if needed (eg. to move the amp jumpers out of the way of the speaker).

And voila! You are now ready to enjoy your Boombeastic.