There's an article that tells you that. I believe it's linked somewhere above this comment.

The article removes all the smart features (not just the annoying ones) and requires pretty serious knowledge of analog electronics. Probably it doesn't fit the bill for the parent comment.

> and requires pretty serious knowledge of analog electronics

If you want to understand the whole thing in depth, then yes, I guess so. However, at the end it just links to the already made project published at MIT license that you can simply replicate with barely any knowledge. It's an equivalent of self-compiling a software project after checking out its repo, which sure, may seem overwhelming if you never did that before, but ultimately it boils down to some reading comprehension and step following exercise.

>It's an equivalent of self-compiling a software project after checking out its repo

I would not assign this to someone as their first electronics project. They would have to order all the components and get the PCB etched themselves. There's a fair bit of soldering, and a usable soldering iron is not cheap. And there's no undo button in hardware: if you solder something in backwards and pop it, you get pay for a new component and wait for it to ship to you.

Why would you bother with etching such PCB yourself if you can order 10 of them for $4, and that's including shipping? Get two sets of components in case you screw up and then just solder all this exclusively through-hole and one-sided stuff with cheapest iron around.

The hardest part will be ordering the components, or more specifically verifying that you got them right, as the KiCad project does not include a BOM. Other than that, it's as easy as it gets. Entry-level workshop stuff, about as complex as ArduTouch. People who never held a soldering iron in their life successfully learn on this kind of boards.

(and if you're willing to spare a few more bucks you could even get it assembled by a PCB fab and just receive ready-made boards in your mailbox - the prices aren't prohibitive there either)

I mean, it's a speaker in a box, so you could also just snip the speaker wires, ditch the circuit board, solder some extension wires, and plug it into an external audio amplifier box of your choice.

If you go that route you don't really need much EE knowledge.

(This is also only if you already have this box and want to reuse it. Otherwise I would just go to your next neighborhood garage sale and pick up some good speakers for $10)

> I'm not an EE, but would love to know how I can disable these incredible unsmart features

I am an EE, so let me tell you.

Use a hammer.

The author of the article starts out asking, "why would someone throw them out like that?"

Now we have the answer.

Jim Marshall is rolling over in his grave at what happened to this company.

You can replace the innards with those of another, stupider, Bluetooth speaker.

...with the risk that you may get "THE BLUETOOTH DEVICE IS READY TO PAIR" instead, although others have figured out how to replace the prompt sounds on some series such as the JieLi SoCs.

> "THE BLUETOOTH DEVICE IS READY TO PAIR"

And now I wish HN had spoiler tags and a culture of using them along with trigger warnings...

Return that crap and buy something like Audio Pro speakers instead