3 ms·

Apple headphones have full-on computers inside them. No way with a B able to operate with power from solar cells

by tomcam 4y ago

hnlmorg 4y ago
Sorry, that Apple comment was intended to be taken sarcastically rather than literally -- I really should have made that clear in the comment itself. The point being: it's disappointing just how skeptical everyone is being. I'm not suggesting that the PR hasn't given favorable figures but there might still be a genuinely great product here.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Awkward for me because I am usually in your position. I do like where your heart is. But the physics just won’t work out. You cannot power modern noise suppression, speaker drivers, amp, and Bluetooth with solar, using today’s tech, period.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    You can run headphones without any battery what-so-ever when wired to an external amp via an audio jack, and the amount of power sent over that is small. Also it's deceptive to include the amp and speaker drivers as separate items in your list because it is the amp that powers the speakers. Maybe you mean DAC? But DACs are really cheap to power these days so I'm really not concerned about their power draw. There's no mention in the article of automatic noise cancelling. "noise suppression" is an acoustic design rather than electronic one. Eg the way the hardware cups your ears to dampen external sounds. So noise suppression costs nothing in terms of power draw. Whereas "noise cancelling" is what requires a mic and some onboard computation to inverse the sound wave, which will obviously have a power draw. But noise cancelling isn't an "always on" piece of technology, it's something the wearer can enable or disable. So it might be that when running low battery power and thus more dependent on solar, noise cancelling needs to be disabled (assuming this device even ships with it, not all headphones do) and as a wearer you're more dependent on the acoustic properties of the headphones to reduce external noises. So we just have bluetooth and an amp left to power. It may well be that to run the device "fully solar" (ie with zero reserve in the battery) the device has to be wired to the music player via a traditional TRS audio jack. This is already a pretty common thing for bluetooth headphones to support when low on power. Thus the solar cells would be designed to charge the battery when the headphones are off and supplement the battery while in heavy usage. That still seems like a massive win to me because if you use your headphones sporadically or even just have a few hours in the day when you're not using them, you still end up not having to think about recharging your headphones every time you want to use it. And that's exactly how this device is reported by the BBC: not as something that never needs to be charged or is "fully solar" but instead as something that uses solar energy to reduce the need to charge. (I've built speakers and other audio hardware. So while I'm far from an electrical engineer, I'm also not a total noob in this field)

Apple headphones have full-on computers inside them. No way with a B able to operate with power from solar cells

by tomcam 4y ago

Apple headphones have full-on computers inside them. No way with a B able to operate with power from solar cells

Sorry, that Apple comment was intended to be taken sarcastically rather than literally -- I really should have made that clear in the comment itself. The point being: it's disappointing just how skeptical everyone is being. I'm not suggesting that the PR hasn't given favorable figures but there might still be a genuinely great product here.

tomcam 4y ago
Awkward for me because I am usually in your position. I do like where your heart is. But the physics just won’t work out. You cannot power modern noise suppression, speaker drivers, amp, and Bluetooth with solar, using today’s tech, period.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  You can run headphones without any battery what-so-ever when wired to an external amp via an audio jack, and the amount of power sent over that is small. Also it's deceptive to include the amp and speaker drivers as separate items in your list because it is the amp that powers the speakers. Maybe you mean DAC? But DACs are really cheap to power these days so I'm really not concerned about their power draw. There's no mention in the article of automatic noise cancelling. "noise suppression" is an acoustic design rather than electronic one. Eg the way the hardware cups your ears to dampen external sounds. So noise suppression costs nothing in terms of power draw. Whereas "noise cancelling" is what requires a mic and some onboard computation to inverse the sound wave, which will obviously have a power draw. But noise cancelling isn't an "always on" piece of technology, it's something the wearer can enable or disable. So it might be that when running low battery power and thus more dependent on solar, noise cancelling needs to be disabled (assuming this device even ships with it, not all headphones do) and as a wearer you're more dependent on the acoustic properties of the headphones to reduce external noises. So we just have bluetooth and an amp left to power. It may well be that to run the device "fully solar" (ie with zero reserve in the battery) the device has to be wired to the music player via a traditional TRS audio jack. This is already a pretty common thing for bluetooth headphones to support when low on power. Thus the solar cells would be designed to charge the battery when the headphones are off and supplement the battery while in heavy usage. That still seems like a massive win to me because if you use your headphones sporadically or even just have a few hours in the day when you're not using them, you still end up not having to think about recharging your headphones every time you want to use it. And that's exactly how this device is reported by the BBC: not as something that never needs to be charged or is "fully solar" but instead as something that uses solar energy to reduce the need to charge. (I've built speakers and other audio hardware. So while I'm far from an electrical engineer, I'm also not a total noob in this field)