EPTA few of my pals and I decided it would be cool to make marine suits (yes, SC2 marines, not candy-ass 40K marines) out of insulation foam for one of the theme days, "to infinity and beyond". They're coming along nicely, but that's for another blog post. We knew early on that we would need to have the Terran theme blasting somehow, but carrying around a boombox was out of the question. That was when I noticed my pair of lonely, old speakers staring at me from across the room, yearning for a second shot at life.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/nfgSo.jpg)
I took it the pair apart and saw what I had to work with. The two speaker components were easily detachable from the case, but the wires and the board were more problematic.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ryCWu.jpg)
The wires were hot glued in place. Fortunately, a hair dryer worked just fine to melt the glue but not the wire.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/CF4Ne.jpg)
There was still this problem, though. shit. I banged away with a nail and hammer on the case forever, but about 10 minutes and one crunched thumb later, I decided I'd need to get something with a little more umph.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/HTFp4.jpg)
It turned out that a dremel was a pretty good tool for this job, even though it melted the plastic more than it cut it.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/W5nhr.jpg)
It was a bitch to get the front part of the case with the power and volume controls on it. Cutting out the power button was a nerve-wracking experience, and the volume control knob was basically fused with the plastic so i had to leave it be.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7ri6F.jpg)
I took it back and hooked it up. Since the board uses a barrel connector, I had to cut a male barrel and solder it onto some wire. These speakers are designed to run off of a 12V DC current. You can see my terrible 12V battery wannabe in the foreground: I tried to put 8 AA batteries in series, but I guess I didn't wire it well enough or something because it didn't work. A 9V battery works just fine, though. I plugged my miserabile opus into my Zune and was actually pretty surprised when Chemical Brothers's "Star Guitar" started playing at a reasonable volume.
![[image loading]](http://www.sc2blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/ss4-thumb.jpg)
I still have to mount this little hack into the chestpiece. For now I think the best place would be under the lights, on either side of the X.
And that's my little story for now. Expect a full writeup on the costume in a week or two with plenty of pictures. I'm still worried about how long my 9V battery would last, so I think I'm going to do a little bit of testing.
. perhaps i'll cut my teeth on something more technical and post it on there.
