‘Retro’ Programmable Music Box

Being able to play my own music has been a challenge – so I present a ‘retro’ solution that should be of interests to the printables community – a development of the ‘punched card’ system first developed for the cloth industry in late 18th century and subsequently adopted by early computer pioneers and subsequent CNC machinery as ‘punched tape’. 

My design comprises of:

• 3D printed case and sound amplifier for the music box mechanisms available.
• Method of creating 3D printed punched cards to suit.
• A few ‘lessons learnt’ from my journey – especially in noisy motorised drive.

Case and sound amplifier.

My initially planned entry to this competition was quite an ambitious motorised drive system for the ‘15 note’ music box mechanisms. I made a version of this using various horn designs integrated into a simple box.

What I learnt from this was the ’15 note’ tunes available were underwhelming to me, the noise from my geared belt drive system often exceeded the music volume 😊 and that using other people’s designs did not visually integrate with my design – I wanted a horn in the style of a gramophone.

I purchased a ’30 note’ mechanism and started again to create an integrated enclosure and amplification horn in Fusion 360. I chose to design in parts for ease of colour printing, design and assembly. My design is functional, with screw holes to suit mounting of the components and retain the lid in place.

Punched card manufacture

There are a number of websites that have collated music box to suit these mechanisms and enable printed, digital and audio download. I picked a few of these to trial and followed the following methods: 

Download the DXF and process as a sketch in Fusion 360 and print out in sections in 70x220mm strips after a simple extrude of the strip leaving the holes empty. Extruding to 0.5mm ‘card’ thickness worked well for me.

More painful methods include manually punching strips based on PDF, or if you have the skills compose your own music from scratch assisted by some of the available web resources.

Outcomes.

It works 😊 and the tunes that I created from the web resources went through the mechanism and the volume . ‘30 note’ mechanism was certainly an improvement from the 15 note unit.

Future recommendations

• Suggest design your own music box to suit your purchased mechanism and preference od amplifier.
• Motorised drive – make quieter.
• Improve the case design to suit different personal preferences.
• Develop a pinned or jigsaw strip joining system – most full-length tunes would require 4 or 5 strips

Accreditation

Music box Mechanisms – suggest Amazon/Ebay or similar – 30 note mechanism

Inspiration from https://www.bryanbraun.com/2019/11/02/music-box-fun/

Punched Music Samples extracted from from https://musicboxmaniacs.com/