My daughter told me during my projects that she wanted to solder. And in another conversation that she wants a speaker for her iPod Touch (a 1st gen that doesn’t have a speaker).
Last week I shopped Digikey and bought components for a stereo LM386 based amp and two 1″ speakers. We threw in a few capacitors, resistors and a protoboard from Radio Shack and we soldered.
After we assembled the circuit and tried it out, but before we fastened everything down, we discovered it made a humming clicking noise. I built it from the datasheet but I did not breadboard the circuit first. A day later, a breadboard and some testing with a capacitor as a filter, I found that one LM386 did not have a problem, but using two of them did. The fix? I put a 100uF capacitor between the positive and negative.
For the enclosure, we used a First Aid kit in the travel section at Target. Price? $1
