Sorry for the delay in response. It’s been a busy few days!
I took it apart and opened it up. It is an 8 Ohm speaker at a whopping 0.25 Watts (I’m telling you this little dog has a big bark!)
Thankfully there is seemingly endless amounts of room to play in this enclosure. I have a good selection of resistors kicking around so i’ll have a go at it here and see how it goes. I don’t recall what wattage resistors I have, I think 1 Watt… It may be a much higher wattage than it needs, but at least we know heat won’t be an issue
I agree, I could just tape it, I’ve done that in the past with great success, but then I wouldn’t learn anything new from the project and I feel like this would be a good project for the oldest (7 yrs) to help me with since she is always asking to help me with projects. It would be very simple, quick, and nothing to blow up like what happened on the last project that I did with her… Whoops!
…I guess I should explain the explosion a little bit more.
We were spending some quality Dady-Daughter time together and she was having fun with the electronics. Safety glasses on, but low voltage circuit kinda stuff. I preach safety when we do this and although she can be pretty anxious at times, I try to tread lightly on the subject so I don’t scare her off. I give her enough information so that she doesn’t try sticking things into an electrical socket. She was slightly nervous but with my words of comfort that this is a safe experiment, she wanted to keep learning so we get setup. I was playing around with an old oscilloscope I have laying around so we decided to look at different wave forms. I figuredI would show her how a bridge rectifier works, so we plug one onto a bread board and power it up. The wave form was really dirty so I decide to go one step further and add some capacitors to the circuit so she can see what those components do to a circuit. I figured it could lean in to a great discussion if she was interested, or at the least it would show her a different image on the screen and at this point she would be excited to see that too. A little 40VA, 24V transformer was supplying the power for this experiment, but it may have been a 240VAC input and I was running it off a 110V supply so it may have been only 12V output, I don’t recall to be honest, but thats neither here nor there…
I dig up some really old capacitors that I had in a spare parts bin, check the voltage and it looked like it would work with the circuit to provide some noticeable difference. Daughter is starting to lose interest at this point with me having to find capacitors, so I quickly plug them into the circuit and watch the display for a result. At this moment I still have my hand on the capacitor and I am telling her to watch the screen. I feel the capacitor quickly start to bulg in my fingers, then BANG!
At this point she’s freaking out, theres smoke, loud noise, me doing my best to hold my laughter back as I am just then remembering that capacitors are polarity sensitive components, and they fail quite spectacularly! She didn’t think it was quite as funny as I did at the time but I think by now I have earned her trust back enough that she will help me with this project
I deal with AC electricity frequently in my daily job, but when it comes to DC electronics, I am pretty much self taught. It’s just a different beast than the stuff I work on. I enjoy it a lot and I love to learn about it so I appreciate the help and advice that everyone has provided me.
Cheers!
PS: Is this forum on Tapatalk? That is my primary forum interface (I know, it sucks, but it’s SO much more convenient!) and it would be so much easier for me to follow these threads if it was on there.