Chinese factories make such Internet radios on $2 Espressif or Realtek microcontrollers.
With this said, had this been a lower end product, the SoC would probably have been an Allwinner or MTK with a soldered Realtek SDIO WiFi solution.
One of my favourite things about my Sonos setup is that it avoids me having to run bloated cloud service binaries on my personal computing devices. (Most notably, of the services I use, SiriusXM digital services have always been most unpleasant to use.)
And the fact that the module is 3rd labeled, suggests that either Broadcom or Realtek is involved
Much more than just playback.
It may also be that there's somewhere on the pcb you can tap into line level full frequency audio (or maybe not - they could easily do the filtering only in the digital domain)
One thing to keep in mind when doing this is the impedance of the speakers.
I'd measure the resistance across the IKEA ones and whatever speakers you're using first. It may be that the IKEA ones are not the common 8 ohms. If they're more (eg 16 ohms) there's a risk that an 8 ohm speaker will result in too much current through the amplifier.
Almost all modern class D amplifier ASICS have short circuit protection on their outputs
Too much load (low ohmage speakers - things that dip below 1.5ohms for extended intervals) means too much heat dissipated as switching current in the amplifier IC, which burns out a driver FET or some other part of the silicon die.
I'm surprised an outlet as high profile as Make don't at least recommend one, or have any of the usual warnings about high voltage.
On a side note, it's no mean feat integrating large through hole components and tiny SMD parts onto the one PCB, normally power supplies are wave soldered while SMD parts need reflow instead, and hence TVs and the like use seperate PCBs. Pin-in-paste[1] is possible, but only with some parts, so maybe they used automated selective soldering[2] instead?
[1] https://www.7pcb.com/blog/the-application-of-the-pin-in-past...
[2] https://www.nordson.com/en/divisions/select/soldering-proces...
That doesn't detract from the article's interestingness by any means, but pointing out at least some of the risks is the sort of thing that should happen more often in them. The off-hand way in which the enclosure was mentioned detracts a bit, in my mind, from an otherwise interesting article. Maybe I'm overthinking things a bit.
He just pluged in the speaker cables into a different speaker. Started with a speaker and amp all in one box, and a speaker needing an amp. Ended up with a speaker and separate amp in bits on the table, and, if he screws the sonos box back together, a speaker that now needs an amp.
He is now wondering about building a box for this amp. ;)
I would recomend he put the bits back in the box they came in!
Pretty pointless. I've dont the opposite "hack" of mounting amps inside passive speakers, saves on untidy cables.
If you want an external amp for your speaker. Well, go buy one: when you buy it, they will tell you the numbers :)
Sonos Amp costs $599, so this is an interesting alternative.
There are proprietary competitors (Alexa is moving into that space, and Bose has an even more expensive equivalent), but nothing to allow true interop, and Ikea trying to build out that same functionality from scratch would take huge effort and expense, certainly a lot more than the simple-by-comparison requirements of smart bulbs.
Personally, I'd be happy to see Apple eat everyone's lunch here (they're already partway there with arbitrary speaker output from arbitrary input devices), but that's mostly because there's preexisting homebrew that will that bridges arbitrary speakers to virtual Airplay devices and arbitrary input to virtual Airplay streams.
Got a recommendation?
There's obviously a great deal of outsourcing to chinese and taiwanese manufacturers going on here, but they seem to be very competent in the customer role.
I love my IKEA Eneby BT speaker from last year. (This one, with the add-on battery: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00357636/)
I would love for IKEA to go into the standalone analogue speaker segment with a fantastic living room speaker, just to piss off those (often) European and quite pretentious speaker brands. Take on B&W and the likes!
So the result with different speakers will be mediocre at best and indeed far from high quality, even with a high quality speaker strapped on to it.
Solid looking unit from the teardown, I might have to get one...
