Enclosure Construction:
1. Remove paper backing from the SpikerBox plastic enclosure pieces (or you can leave
these on)
2. Place screws in bottom plastic enclosure piece, with screws facing up.
3. Measure your tubing and cut it into 4 equal parts of 0.75 inches and 4 parts of 0.25 inches.
4. Place 0.25 inch spacers on top of screws.
5. Slide your circuit board through the screws on top of the 0.25 inch spacers, and then put
the 0.75 inch spacers on top of the circuit board through the screws.
6. Solder Speaker Connector (female) on ends of speaker wire. Take care that the two solder
joints do not touch. Separate and wrap solder joints away from each other using electrical
tape
7. Press the speaker into the enclosure, then attach the female end of the cord to the male
end of the PCB. If the speaker doesn’t fit, you can lightly sand the inner hole until the
speaker fits. You can use just a touch of superglue in the inside hole to secure speaker. Be
careful—superglue smears acrylic very easily.
8. Slide the top enclosure board on your circuit, , and add the hex nuts to the top of the
SpikerBox. Note that the nuts could go either on the top or bottom of the board. There is an
internal struggle here at Backyard Brains on which looks better: Nuts up vs. Nuts down. It's
your SpikerBox, you decide.
9. Peel and place the cork sticker to the right of the speaker, close to the RCA jack.
Electrode Construction:
1. Unscrew end of RCA connector.
2. Split and Strip ½ inch lengths from speaker wire on both sides and both ends.
3. Place wire in eyelets of RCA connector, solder, and crimp where applicable. Take care that
connections are both strong and not touching each other.
4. Rescrew RCA end back on connector.
5. Solder two sewing needles on other ends of speaker wire.
Congratulations! You are done. Turn on your SpikerBox. If your LED comes on and you hear
your speaker “Click on”, your SpikerBox probably works. Now grab your favorite
invertebrate and do some experiments.
What resistor is what?
Resistors have 3 color stripe bands that signify their values. For example, a 10 Ohm
resistor is Brown, Black, Black as below:
Sometimes you will find an extra silver or gold stripe, but you can
ignore those. (They specify the tolerances, 5%, 10%, etc). For your kit,
you will need the following values:
10 Ω = Brown Black Black
390 Ω = Orange White Brown
1 kΩ = Brown Black Red
10 kΩ = Brown Black Orange
33 kΩ = Orange Orange Orange
220 kΩ = Red Red Yellow
