Echo Dot/Urge Cuatro Enclosure by bpopp

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

So, I'm just going to say it. This is a stupid thing. You really shouldn't even consider building this. If there was a downvote button, this would be where you'd click it and hateful, hurtful comments are semi-justified. If you feel compelled to try and make me cry, I'll understand.
That said, this is one of my favorite designs. It came together well, looks decent, and I'm overall very happy with how it turned out. Done again, I'd try and make it smaller, but again, it's a stupid idea so I won't do it again.
The original idea was to build an Amazon Echo for my garage at half the cost using an Amazon Dot and a cheap $20 Bluetooth speaker called the Urge Basics Cuatro. If Amazon Echo's still cost $200, I would feel much better about how this turned out. Unfortunately, around the time I ordered my dot, the echo's started dropping in price. First they went to $99, and a few days ago I just saw one for less than $75. At that price, you really can't beat the quality and price (the rumor is that a nextgen version of the echo is right around the corner).
I originally planned on breaking the Cuatro speaker down and trying to build a smaller, custom enclosure for the internal parts. This would have left me with a much smaller overall size, but upon disassembly, it became obvious that this was going to be way trickier than I expected because of the passive radiator. Without that particular feature, the speakers sounded horribly anemic so I ended up just enclosing the entire speaker.
I power mine with a cheap 5v internal PSU. I just as easily could have used a USB Y connector, but I ordered a bunch of these for arduino projects and wanted to avoid needing a wall-wart.
So just to drive home how stupid this thing is. Here's the breakdown.
Design time: roughly 10 hours.
Print time: 20+ hours (the first prototype failed).
Filament cost: probably $5 to $10 bucks
Electronic (Dot/Speaker/PSU): $70
Amazon Echo cost: $75 shipped