13:30 Printable Headphones

This project started as a thought piece around printed consumer electronics and the idea that they could be as easy to turn into working product as they are to print. Meaning that once off the print bed, such an object could be assembled without any tools, and be made functional by readily attainable components. Being electronically simple yet functionally complex, headphones seemed like a good fit to stress test this premiss. The first go at this idea resulted in good looking, well working model that we created at our studio on a professional ABS FDM machine (Dimension 1200ES, print time about 13 hours and 30 minutes, hence the name). It worked well here, but the machine we used is not very accessible to the average maker, and two of the critical parts relied heavily on soluble support printing that this machine specializes in. To really test this idea of printed CE, it needs to be created by the people who would use it. To this end, I have begun to adapt the design to the Maker Bot Replicator. The main challenge being how to build to a similar level of quality and without soluble support. With a bit of experimentation, I am pretty confident it can be done. So look for some updates on that soon! In the meantime, here is the current model(s), component list, and instructions to make your own working headphones right now.

File Update(09/12/2013):
For those of you who truly want to customize 13:30 I have added STEP files of both the V1 and V2 versions. Enjoy!

File update(10/15/2012):
Did some further work on the 'Replicator' version of 1330 last week and this past weekend. As mentioned above, the goal of this mod is to create self supporting speaker housings that builds cleanly on single material printer with out the need for soluble support. So far its been a real interesting discovery process and this latest version, called V2, is actually the 5th iteration of this challenge. V2 still requires some custom breakaway support structures (in the file) so its not quite there yet, but it is real close. I have uploaded the latest STLs for V2 1330 headphones for you to try out. Enjoy!