Alecto garden speaker mod

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AshaiRey
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Alecto garden speaker mod

Post by AshaiRey »

Here's an item from my site about a simple mod of an Alecto garden speaker.

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For some time now i got this garden speaker set. They survive an occasional rain shower and the sound is oke. I've hooked them up to my domotica system to stream music and announcements to them. However they have a big downside and that is that when you switch them OFF and ON again they reset. This means you can't use motion detection to turn the speaker on because they reset to default settings. The only way is to keep them powered on all the time. The thing is when you plug them in you have to press the ON button. Then you have to press the volume UP button several times because the volume defaults also to the lowest level. To solve this I was thinking of adding an ATTiny to the buttons to simulate keypresses at power up but it didn't feel right, to much over engineered.

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So what do i want?
I want the speaker turned on when the power goes on and retain the previous sound level when turned off. Nothing more then that. Waterwheel
The power on button controls a relay on the PCB to switch the power to the rest of the board. I made a wire bridge over the relay contacts and now the speaker goes on when power goes on, great! Step one ticked off.

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Next the volume problem. The whole volume control is done by one IC (PTC5266). So audio is going into the chip at 0db. Some magic happens in the chip and the audio comes out at a lower level again and is send to the amplifier.
Waterwheel
So why not by pass the chip?
I soldered 2 wires to the PCB. One at audio IN and one at audio OUT and connected a potentiometer to the wires. Now the audio input is directly connected to audio OUT (which goes to the amplifier) and the volume can be preset with the potentiometer.
Job done. Works just as planned now.
Bram
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esschenk
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Re: Alecto garden speaker mod

Post by esschenk »

Nice project

Ed
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