Bluetooth/3.5mm speaker and FM radio, for $5? Can you email me a picture, Colin? On 2025-08-17 16:23, Colin McGregor via Talk wrote:
Small follow-up to the following, yesterday I was in one of the Dollarama stores near my home (close to Yonge & Eglinton). They had some "Tech 1" (Dollarama house brand I assume) $5 Bluetooth speakers (roughly 8.5 cm x 7 cm x 3.5 cm) that I have not seen before. These Bluetooth speakers have a feature not noted on the packaging, a 3.5mm female audio jack, so could be used with the set-up noted below.
On the positive about this $5 speaker, it does come with a built in rechargeable battery that according to the instructions will run this at 50% volume for 3-4 hours. It does come with a short USB A to USB C charging cable. It does have an FM radio tuner built in. The instructions are trilingual (English / French / Spanish), (but the text size is a bit small). There is a small cord loop on the speaker which I assume was meant to be used with a carabiner so you could clip this speaker to a backpack / belt / etc. for music / etc. on the go.
On the negative about this $5 speaker, the controls are flat black buttons on a flat black background, so in dim light or for the vision impaired, well the power button is larger than the other buttons and can be felt but good luck telling which of the other buttons is which. Operation of the speaker in FM radio mode ... seems less than intuitive. You are on your own for audio cable(s), but for a few $ extra Dollerama could get you sorted out there.
As previously noted I am not an audiophile, so I can't really comment on how good / bad this speaker is other than to note it sounds fine to me.
Still, if you are looking for low cost, possibly so-so quality audio for a computer, such as a Raspberry Pi, this is at least worth considering.
On Mon, Apr 7, 2025 at 10:47 PM Colin McGregor <colin.mc151@gmail.com> wrote:
A feature of the original Raspberry Pi from the original on up to the Raspberry Pi 4 was a 3.5 mm audio jack for sound output. I am told by audiophiles that the Pi audio out ... wasn't very good, but to me it sounded fine. With the Raspberry Pi 5 that audio jack was dropped. The loss of that audio jack isn't an issue if you're connecting to a TV via HDMI (use the TV audio), or if you don't need audio, or you use a Bluetooth speaker.
But what if you want things more-or-less the way they were before? A visit to Dollarama might be your answer. At Dollarama I ran across a USB-C to audio cable for use with the likes of mobile phones for a little less than $5. Of course the Raspberry Pi 5 uses USB A for its' USB input/output connectors, but again for a little less than $5 you can get a Dollarama USB A to USB C adapter. Connect the above together and the Raspberry PI will see this as an audio device and be able to pass audio out. Less than $10 (before tax) and you can be back almost to the way things were before (okay granted this way you are down one USB port :-( , still that isn't too bad in most situations). Going beyond the above, Dollarama does sell an audio speaker (available in white red or black) about the size of a beverage can with a 3.5 mm input jack for $5 (plus HST) that can (in my case) run off an old phone charger (I didn't try the Dollarama phone charger, but that could be an option). Add in a Dollarama audio cable and you are good. Now, I am not enough of an audiophile to be able to tell if all of the above is good, but it does sound fine to me.
I thought that getting a complete, if VERY modest, computer audio system at a dollar store is a bit wild and worth sharing.
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