Over the last few months I've been hacking away at my case, spraying it various colours and generally spending all my money on it. Then I began to realise - hang on, why give the case all the attention? That's when I noticed my little subwoofer...
Here is the basic subwoofer unit ->Boring and just waiting for a mod! I think some LEDs are required here.

Ok, first things first I need to get access to the front bezel of the subwoofer so that I can inspect the electronics. I made sure the power is switched off *before* opening the unit. I've marked the screws that needed to be removed, all 8 of them!


Now the back panel has been removed you can see the rear of the speaker and lots of lovely electronics :oP. It's now possible to remove yet more screws to loosen the front bezel.

So after removing the screws it should be easy to remove the bezel , right? Erm no actually! Thanks to this being a very cheap subwoofer, with very poor build quality, the front would not come off. I simply took a screw driver and forced the front off to reveal the glue holding it on.

Next step is to have a sniff around the electronics, it all smells good to me so its time for the mod...

What I'm going to be doing is lighting the sub up from the inside and hopefully creating a stunning effect. So LED changing/adding here we go. First step is to pull out the power LED, not a difficult task after removing the cheapo glue gun job :) Then it's just a case of putting 2 more LEDs in series with the power one, no resistors required as there is already one there for the original LED. Take your pick your pick of colours... I feel like blue :o)
As soon as its all wired up I fired up the glue gun and stuck the two LEDs in place.

Thats one LED in place, just the other one left to do...

...JOB DONE! Before the update of this article I left those wires loose. This caused a problem when the music was played loud, as the wires were rattled by the bass.

Simple solution was to tape the wires down. I could have used some heat shrink tubing to make it neater but I didn't have any available.



Almost there now, just bung it all back together and test.
Oooo - no power, could be a problem. Notice the rare black LED other wise know as the nuked LED :)

I discovered that the new power LED (high bright) was drawing to much current from the circuit and somehow ended up blowing its self up. I replaced it with another just to be sure and that blew up to! After hours of madness this happened:

Yes that is my trouser after being set alight by the soldering iron. I wouldn't recommend standing on soldering irons but if you feel the need, go right ahead :-) So no power led but that's not to much of a problem. I can now setup the circuit with that led missing. Plug in and power on!

WOW! Amazing it works...and rocks at the same time! 


The final result...It looks so good and was quite simple to perform. OK so a few minor problems I hope to sort out, but nothing major. Recommended to anyone with a similar subwoofer or who feels the need to burn them selves on a soldering iron -hehe
The problem with the LED wires being bounced around with the bass has now been fixed, Ill get around to fixing the power led sometime and I've got a few other things planned for this subwoofer - So you haven't seen the last of it yet ;).
By: Blueice |