8 ms·

Solar-powered headphones

51 points by adrian_mrd 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago
Dont (non active noise cancelling) headphones already not use any power?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  Wired headphones get power from whatever they are plugged into. Once you decide you don’t want to physically connected to the grid while wearing the headphones, you’re going to carry a battery around (or generate power with solar or something). If you’re also carrying some additional device (eg. a phone or mp3 player) along with the headphones and you’re wired into that device, you could have that device handle the power. Nowadays I’m frequently switching my listening and speaking between different devices, some of which are on my person and some aren’t. So plugging the headphones whatever I’m currently using would be inconvenient and restrict my freedom of movement. Therefore it’s nice to have for the headphones to contain their own battery and do automatic switching between different input devices. Solar sounds like a gimmick to me, the battery life of the headphones is not any issue anymore.
- oneplane 4y ago
  Only if they are wired. The article is about wireless headphones and people forgetting to charge them. It's a bit advertorial-ish because this is exactly the product that a brand has launched just now. Technically it could help but just like solar-powered garden lights, it's a race you can't win with ambient light. If someone were to find an amazing headmounted-solar-power-source, it would have to be so good you'd be able to charge your mobile devices with it (or you'd have to walk in the sun all day long to keep it going and have enough of a charge for the night).
- autoexec 4y ago
  Yeah, since you're already listening to something using a powered device it'd certainly be far better for the environment to not add another toxic battery in your headphones and just plug them into whatever your listening to.
flothebre 4y ago
superkuh 4y ago
No. The available surface area is too low.
- aetherspawn 4y ago
  We’re not talking about powering a car here. Most headphones have a tiny tiny energy draw to maximise the energy of their tiny lightweight battery.
- mthomasmw 4y ago
  'Currently the tech can create one hour's worth of power "from just 20 minutes of English or Swedish summer sunshine".'
  - LightG 4y ago
    So ... 20 minutes use per year. Nice.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      Presumably, it is referring to strength of sunlight at that latitude. 3:1 runtime to charge time for strong solar lighting really isn't bad at all if the cells are durable enough for a wearable item and the speakers don't suck.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        I think GP is joking about getting just 6m40s of sunshine per year in England/Sweden.
- TOMDM 4y ago
  From the article: "The solar-powered headphones still have a built-in battery that can power up to 80 hours of playback time. It is this that the Powerfoyle strip charges. Mr Fili says that currently the tech can create one hour's worth of power "from just 20 minutes of English or Swedish summer sunshine"." A very bold claim, I do wonder if that's with the strip placed optimally facing the sun, and not integrated into a headset. The idea of a solar jacket to keep a hikers satellite phone topped off sounds more attractive though.
syntaxing 4y ago
How often do people use their headphones outdoors? I would be very surprised if the average time outdoor over the lifetime of a headphone to be over 5%.
- metadat 4y ago
  The article states that the kind of PV charger they're using works under any light source, including artificial lighting. It's about half as efficient at converting light into electricity as current best rooftop panels, and these ones are way thinner.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    My whole room is lighted by maybe 20W of LEDs, so it gets what, 5W of light? Very few of those Watts hit the solar panel.
  - teraflop 4y ago
    OK, but efficiency at converting light into electricity doesn't mean much if the total amount of light available for conversion is very low -- which it is in almost all indoor situations. The illumination level in a brightly-lit office is typically on the order of 300 lux, compared to 100,000 lux for direct sunlight. (Residential spaces are often even dimmer.) So if, as they claim, this device can gain 1 hour of charge in 20 minutes in direct sunlight, it would take on the order of 100 hours to collect the same amount of energy indoors. The statement that "the panels can also create some power from artificial light" is technically true, but "some" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
    - metadat 4y ago
      > this device can gain 1 hour of charge in 20 minutes in direct sunlight, it would take on the order of 100 hours to collect the same amount of energy indoors Depending how frequent and heavy of a user you are, the economics may work out such that they'll be passively charged enough and never require active charging. Related idea: It'd be cool if cellphones could charge in light whilst powered off. Then when they get old, they'll sit around and always be topped up and ready to go.
FrankTheDank 4y ago
The quicklook of these on LTT was pretty favorable. They actually seem pretty neat. I prefer earbuds for running though so not for me. Like the idea though
gw99 4y ago
I didn’t know BBC were running adverts these days…
- _-_-__-_-_- 4y ago
  That was my first thought as well. It will be interesting to see future applications of this technology. If they can get the costs down and the charging is actually efficient enough, it'll be worth it.
- pengaru 4y ago
  Never heard of Top Gear?
- taspeotis 4y ago
  https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/commercial-services#3advertisementfeatures https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/commercial-services#...
droopyEyelids 4y ago
thatguymike 4y ago
[flagged]
waterpowder 4y ago
And as always... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
akamaka 4y ago
How powerful of a computing device could be powered by a small solar panel these days? We had solar powered calculators in the 1980s, but with chips being so much more energy efficient now, I imagine we could build a much more impressive device with no battery.
- alar44 4y ago
  Not really. To power an Arduino you need a much bigger solar panel than a calculator. Those calculators aren't necessarily inefficient, they just hardly do anything at all. You really can't do much more with a solar panel that size, it hardly captures any energy.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Arduino’s are very power hungry compared to low power electronics. RFID tags for example are extremely low power. That said, there are solar powered scientific calculators which have dramatically more computing power and much larger displays than what people think of a solar calculators and still operate indoors at low light levels. Ex: TI-36X Pro A modern redesign could probably probably get ~1 GFLOPs, but those things are more designed for standardized tests than to be a useful tool.
    - akamaka 4y ago
      Thanks, this is a great data point. TI has some higher end calculators which are not solar powered, so that gives a good estimate of what was possible (at least when they last redesigned them).
  - etrautmann 4y ago
    logitech used to get away with solar cells on the K750. It did sometimes die if left without much light but I was impressed it could operate as well as it did without direct sunlight.
    - akamaka 4y ago
user_named 4y ago
I have the first version of those Adidas headphones, that do not come with the solar panels but are otherwise the same. I wear them 8 hours per day at the office, at the gym, while jogging etc. Light and stay on your head well. Highly recommended. The new version looks to be twice the cost so I don't think I'll upgrade anytime soon but I'd probably get them if these fail out of warranty.
noipv4 4y ago
https://miscircuitos.com/lab-characterization-of-the-solar-cell-ixys-kxob22/ https://miscircuitos.com/lab-characterization-of-the-solar-c...
bArray 4y ago
In the UK, where the BBC is hosted, solar-powered headphones are mostly a waste of time. It rains a lot and you spend a lot of time avoiding being outside. Most people are at work when the sun is highest in the sky. As others point out, most people can get through the whole day on one charge. It would be much more efficient to put solar-panels where they can maximize their potential energy output and instead just charge normal headphones from renewable sources. Bare in mind that the creation of the solar panels themselves has a carbon offset that the application of headphones is unlikely to recoup.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  I think I've only seen two kinds of devices where an integrated solar panel actually made sense: calculators as their power draw is so low the one I bought almost 20 years ago for school still works with the original (non-rechargeable) battery. And more recently a GPS sports watch which can extend the battery life with solar for hours, or days when GPS isn't used. Other than that I agree, if you compare the power output to roof-mounted ones it seems quite pointless. Even relatively large, unwieldy USB charging panels you need to unfold can't hold up considering their area.
  - ajb 4y ago
    Looks quite handy on a USB power bank: https://www.revk.uk/2022/09/battery-pack.html?m=1 https://www.revk.uk/2022/09/battery-pack.html?m=1 "Obviously these various battery packs were now all flat. One of the reasons for a battery back is for when you suddenly find you need portable power for something like this. All flat, except one! I can only assume it was getting enough light from my office lights, even in a clear plastic box, to actually stay charged." That is, not to charge the power bank (which would take ages) but to keep it charged during storage.
    - yurishimo 4y ago
      I have one of these. It looks nearly identical but mine is green. I went motocamping for 3 weeks with somewhat limited access to electricity at times. I think my longest stretch was 3 days of camping with no access to plug in and recharge the pack. I was charging my iPhone 11, AirPods, and an Apple Watch. My phone was plugged into my motorcycle to charge/maintain while riding. The battery was positioned in a tank bag exposed to the sun for 8+ hours of riding per day. When I eventually used the battery's full capacity, any charge from the sun was basically useless until I was able to plug into line power again. I think after nearly a full day of riding after waking up to an empty battery, I might have gotten 3% on my phone when I stopped for the evening. When I returned home from the trip, I experimented with recharging the battery out on my apartment's veranda on the top floor with lots of sunlight all day. It took 3 or 4 days for the battery indicator light to move up 1 segment. Too long to be useful in any meaningful way. My point in all of this, is that these cheap "solar charging" battery banks are worthless unless you can live with waiting 2+ weeks to maybe charge your device. The panels are likely larger versions of the stuff used on calculators and should not be relied on. It's a marketing gimmick.
parski 4y ago
The density of e-waste goes up.
quicon 4y ago
I bought the Urbanista headphones mentioned in the article. That was 6 months ago, I've used them daily indoors for meetings and listening to music, and I had to charge them with a cable only once in those six months. My desk is by a window and I live in Barcelona, so the headphones get quite a lot of indirect sunlight. Still, they feel like magic to me.
lakomen 4y ago
Why does no one create solar powered Smartphones though?
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  The amount of power required by a smart phone massively exceeds the amount of power that can be supplied by the area available
nigerianbrince 4y ago
Coming up next, headphones that are powered by the bobbing of your head.
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  Not a completely unfeasible idea. Kinetically wound/charged watches have been a thing for decades
ChrisRR 4y ago
Remember when headphones were wired and didn't need power?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  I do. But the biggest e-waste manufacturers in the world (Apple, Samsung, etc.) decided they can now sell you Bluetooth earbuds too, so removing the jack was a nice nudge to force you to buy more of their e-waste. I'm not against Bluetooth earbuds but I'm against removing the jack.
mnw21cam 4y ago
Ok, but let's not fool ourselves that this is to save the mains electric grid from the power used to charge these things. This is for convenience, not environmentalism. The amount of power used by headphones is tiny. Which is lucky, because the amount of power that a small inefficient solar cell like that can collect in artificial lighting is tiny as well. For reference, my Bose noise-cancelling headphones use something on the order of a tenth of a Watt. My microwave oven uses 5W just to keep the clock flashing "--:--". I have a 14-year old wristwatch, which is solar powered. I haven't had to change a battery in it ever. It's convenience, and it's neat, but that's it.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  This isn’t necessarily the full picture. Whenever I see efficiency gains, I tend to look for reductions in materials utilizations, and sometimes I might find a case for environmentalism (on some axis). I work in the technical area that enables flexible solar panels to exist at large volume (replacing energy intensive rigid glass with flexible barrier films). The manufactures of these headsets note that it allows for a larger volume reduction in batteries when integrated across 100,000s units compared to the addition of the panel itself. Also, the technology supports the global supply chain to continue to lower the cost of PV which is good for the environment. An eventual goal is the ability to quickly unroll massive installations of PV on rooftops that are as durable as the roof itself.
yellowapple 4y ago
Around 10 years ago Logitech sold solar-powered wireless keyboards (maybe they still do). They were pretty nice, and not having to deal with wires or batteries ever is something I miss now that I've switched over to mechanical keyboards. Hopefully the "make everything solar powered" idea catches on at some point. I feel like solar-powered phones and tablets with e-ink displays should exist by now.

51 points by adrian_mrd 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago

Dont (non active noise cancelling) headphones already not use any power?

fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
Wired headphones get power from whatever they are plugged into. Once you decide you don’t want to physically connected to the grid while wearing the headphones, you’re going to carry a battery around (or generate power with solar or something). If you’re also carrying some additional device (eg. a phone or mp3 player) along with the headphones and you’re wired into that device, you could have that device handle the power. Nowadays I’m frequently switching my listening and speaking between different devices, some of which are on my person and some aren’t. So plugging the headphones whatever I’m currently using would be inconvenient and restrict my freedom of movement. Therefore it’s nice to have for the headphones to contain their own battery and do automatic switching between different input devices. Solar sounds like a gimmick to me, the battery life of the headphones is not any issue anymore.
oneplane 4y ago
Only if they are wired. The article is about wireless headphones and people forgetting to charge them. It's a bit advertorial-ish because this is exactly the product that a brand has launched just now. Technically it could help but just like solar-powered garden lights, it's a race you can't win with ambient light. If someone were to find an amazing headmounted-solar-power-source, it would have to be so good you'd be able to charge your mobile devices with it (or you'd have to walk in the sun all day long to keep it going and have enough of a charge for the night).
autoexec 4y ago
Yeah, since you're already listening to something using a powered device it'd certainly be far better for the environment to not add another toxic battery in your headphones and just plug them into whatever your listening to.

flothebre 4y ago

superkuh 4y ago

No. The available surface area is too low.

aetherspawn 4y ago
We’re not talking about powering a car here. Most headphones have a tiny tiny energy draw to maximise the energy of their tiny lightweight battery.
mthomasmw 4y ago
'Currently the tech can create one hour's worth of power "from just 20 minutes of English or Swedish summer sunshine".'
- LightG 4y ago
  So ... 20 minutes use per year. Nice.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Presumably, it is referring to strength of sunlight at that latitude. 3:1 runtime to charge time for strong solar lighting really isn't bad at all if the cells are durable enough for a wearable item and the speakers don't suck.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      I think GP is joking about getting just 6m40s of sunshine per year in England/Sweden.
TOMDM 4y ago
From the article: "The solar-powered headphones still have a built-in battery that can power up to 80 hours of playback time. It is this that the Powerfoyle strip charges. Mr Fili says that currently the tech can create one hour's worth of power "from just 20 minutes of English or Swedish summer sunshine"." A very bold claim, I do wonder if that's with the strip placed optimally facing the sun, and not integrated into a headset. The idea of a solar jacket to keep a hikers satellite phone topped off sounds more attractive though.

syntaxing 4y ago

How often do people use their headphones outdoors? I would be very surprised if the average time outdoor over the lifetime of a headphone to be over 5%.

metadat 4y ago
The article states that the kind of PV charger they're using works under any light source, including artificial lighting. It's about half as efficient at converting light into electricity as current best rooftop panels, and these ones are way thinner.
- adrianN 4y ago
  My whole room is lighted by maybe 20W of LEDs, so it gets what, 5W of light? Very few of those Watts hit the solar panel.
- teraflop 4y ago
  OK, but efficiency at converting light into electricity doesn't mean much if the total amount of light available for conversion is very low -- which it is in almost all indoor situations. The illumination level in a brightly-lit office is typically on the order of 300 lux, compared to 100,000 lux for direct sunlight. (Residential spaces are often even dimmer.) So if, as they claim, this device can gain 1 hour of charge in 20 minutes in direct sunlight, it would take on the order of 100 hours to collect the same amount of energy indoors. The statement that "the panels can also create some power from artificial light" is technically true, but "some" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
  - metadat 4y ago
    > this device can gain 1 hour of charge in 20 minutes in direct sunlight, it would take on the order of 100 hours to collect the same amount of energy indoors Depending how frequent and heavy of a user you are, the economics may work out such that they'll be passively charged enough and never require active charging. Related idea: It'd be cool if cellphones could charge in light whilst powered off. Then when they get old, they'll sit around and always be topped up and ready to go.

FrankTheDank 4y ago

The quicklook of these on LTT was pretty favorable. They actually seem pretty neat. I prefer earbuds for running though so not for me. Like the idea though

gw99 4y ago

I didn’t know BBC were running adverts these days…

_-_-__-_-_- 4y ago
That was my first thought as well. It will be interesting to see future applications of this technology. If they can get the costs down and the charging is actually efficient enough, it'll be worth it.
pengaru 4y ago
Never heard of Top Gear?
taspeotis 4y ago
https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/commercial-services#3advertisementfeatures https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/commercial-services#...

droopyEyelids 4y ago

thatguymike 4y ago

[flagged]

waterpowder 4y ago

And as always... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

akamaka 4y ago

How powerful of a computing device could be powered by a small solar panel these days? We had solar powered calculators in the 1980s, but with chips being so much more energy efficient now, I imagine we could build a much more impressive device with no battery.

alar44 4y ago
Not really. To power an Arduino you need a much bigger solar panel than a calculator. Those calculators aren't necessarily inefficient, they just hardly do anything at all. You really can't do much more with a solar panel that size, it hardly captures any energy.
- Retric 4y ago
  Arduino’s are very power hungry compared to low power electronics. RFID tags for example are extremely low power. That said, there are solar powered scientific calculators which have dramatically more computing power and much larger displays than what people think of a solar calculators and still operate indoors at low light levels. Ex: TI-36X Pro A modern redesign could probably probably get ~1 GFLOPs, but those things are more designed for standardized tests than to be a useful tool.
  - akamaka 4y ago
    Thanks, this is a great data point. TI has some higher end calculators which are not solar powered, so that gives a good estimate of what was possible (at least when they last redesigned them).
- etrautmann 4y ago
  logitech used to get away with solar cells on the K750. It did sometimes die if left without much light but I was impressed it could operate as well as it did without direct sunlight.
  - akamaka 4y ago

user_named 4y ago

I have the first version of those Adidas headphones, that do not come with the solar panels but are otherwise the same. I wear them 8 hours per day at the office, at the gym, while jogging etc. Light and stay on your head well. Highly recommended. The new version looks to be twice the cost so I don't think I'll upgrade anytime soon but I'd probably get them if these fail out of warranty.

noipv4 4y ago

https://miscircuitos.com/lab-characterization-of-the-solar-cell-ixys-kxob22/ https://miscircuitos.com/lab-characterization-of-the-solar-c...

bArray 4y ago

In the UK, where the BBC is hosted, solar-powered headphones are mostly a waste of time. It rains a lot and you spend a lot of time avoiding being outside. Most people are at work when the sun is highest in the sky. As others point out, most people can get through the whole day on one charge. It would be much more efficient to put solar-panels where they can maximize their potential energy output and instead just charge normal headphones from renewable sources. Bare in mind that the creation of the solar panels themselves has a carbon offset that the application of headphones is unlikely to recoup.

alpaca128 4y ago
I think I've only seen two kinds of devices where an integrated solar panel actually made sense: calculators as their power draw is so low the one I bought almost 20 years ago for school still works with the original (non-rechargeable) battery. And more recently a GPS sports watch which can extend the battery life with solar for hours, or days when GPS isn't used. Other than that I agree, if you compare the power output to roof-mounted ones it seems quite pointless. Even relatively large, unwieldy USB charging panels you need to unfold can't hold up considering their area.
- ajb 4y ago
  Looks quite handy on a USB power bank: https://www.revk.uk/2022/09/battery-pack.html?m=1 https://www.revk.uk/2022/09/battery-pack.html?m=1 "Obviously these various battery packs were now all flat. One of the reasons for a battery back is for when you suddenly find you need portable power for something like this. All flat, except one! I can only assume it was getting enough light from my office lights, even in a clear plastic box, to actually stay charged." That is, not to charge the power bank (which would take ages) but to keep it charged during storage.
  - yurishimo 4y ago
    I have one of these. It looks nearly identical but mine is green. I went motocamping for 3 weeks with somewhat limited access to electricity at times. I think my longest stretch was 3 days of camping with no access to plug in and recharge the pack. I was charging my iPhone 11, AirPods, and an Apple Watch. My phone was plugged into my motorcycle to charge/maintain while riding. The battery was positioned in a tank bag exposed to the sun for 8+ hours of riding per day. When I eventually used the battery's full capacity, any charge from the sun was basically useless until I was able to plug into line power again. I think after nearly a full day of riding after waking up to an empty battery, I might have gotten 3% on my phone when I stopped for the evening. When I returned home from the trip, I experimented with recharging the battery out on my apartment's veranda on the top floor with lots of sunlight all day. It took 3 or 4 days for the battery indicator light to move up 1 segment. Too long to be useful in any meaningful way. My point in all of this, is that these cheap "solar charging" battery banks are worthless unless you can live with waiting 2+ weeks to maybe charge your device. The panels are likely larger versions of the stuff used on calculators and should not be relied on. It's a marketing gimmick.

parski 4y ago

The density of e-waste goes up.

quicon 4y ago

I bought the Urbanista headphones mentioned in the article. That was 6 months ago, I've used them daily indoors for meetings and listening to music, and I had to charge them with a cable only once in those six months. My desk is by a window and I live in Barcelona, so the headphones get quite a lot of indirect sunlight. Still, they feel like magic to me.

lakomen 4y ago

Why does no one create solar powered Smartphones though?

ChrisRR 4y ago
The amount of power required by a smart phone massively exceeds the amount of power that can be supplied by the area available

nigerianbrince 4y ago

Coming up next, headphones that are powered by the bobbing of your head.

ChrisRR 4y ago
Not a completely unfeasible idea. Kinetically wound/charged watches have been a thing for decades

ChrisRR 4y ago

Remember when headphones were wired and didn't need power?

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
I do. But the biggest e-waste manufacturers in the world (Apple, Samsung, etc.) decided they can now sell you Bluetooth earbuds too, so removing the jack was a nice nudge to force you to buy more of their e-waste. I'm not against Bluetooth earbuds but I'm against removing the jack.

mnw21cam 4y ago

Ok, but let's not fool ourselves that this is to save the mains electric grid from the power used to charge these things. This is for convenience, not environmentalism. The amount of power used by headphones is tiny. Which is lucky, because the amount of power that a small inefficient solar cell like that can collect in artificial lighting is tiny as well. For reference, my Bose noise-cancelling headphones use something on the order of a tenth of a Watt. My microwave oven uses 5W just to keep the clock flashing "--:--". I have a 14-year old wristwatch, which is solar powered. I haven't had to change a battery in it ever. It's convenience, and it's neat, but that's it.

mensetmanusman 4y ago
This isn’t necessarily the full picture. Whenever I see efficiency gains, I tend to look for reductions in materials utilizations, and sometimes I might find a case for environmentalism (on some axis). I work in the technical area that enables flexible solar panels to exist at large volume (replacing energy intensive rigid glass with flexible barrier films). The manufactures of these headsets note that it allows for a larger volume reduction in batteries when integrated across 100,000s units compared to the addition of the panel itself. Also, the technology supports the global supply chain to continue to lower the cost of PV which is good for the environment. An eventual goal is the ability to quickly unroll massive installations of PV on rooftops that are as durable as the roof itself.

yellowapple 4y ago

Around 10 years ago Logitech sold solar-powered wireless keyboards (maybe they still do). They were pretty nice, and not having to deal with wires or batteries ever is something I miss now that I've switched over to mechanical keyboards. Hopefully the "make everything solar powered" idea catches on at some point. I feel like solar-powered phones and tablets with e-ink displays should exist by now.