Bluetooth Headset Battery Swap Keeps Going And Going…

bluetooth_headset_battery

[Reginaldo] purchased a cheap Bluetooth headset adapter, and while it worked well with all of his devices, he was disappointed to find that the battery life didn’t quite live up to the manufacturer’s claims. Advertised as capable of operating for 10 hours, he discovered that the device would typically die after only 7. He wanted more from the headset, so he took things into his own hands and replaced it with a much larger battery (Google Translation).

His goal was to keep the modifications as cheap as possible, so he repurposed a lot of items he had sitting around the house. He used a battery out of an old cell phone, with a capacity over six times greater than that of his original headset battery. He built a charging circuit using a MCP73863 microchip, specifically designed for managing Li-Ion/Li-Poly batteries. The Bluetooth headset was dismantled and repackaged in the shell of a cheap “audio amplifier” that he had on hand, along with the new battery and charging circuit. A nifty Hackaday logo was included on the outside of the new battery case, and the project was deemed complete.

[Reginaldo] reports that he is quite happy with his battery retrofit. The new power brick only takes about half an hour longer to charge, but can now be used for approximately 44 hours before requiring a recharge – not too shabby!

6 thoughts on “Bluetooth Headset Battery Swap Keeps Going And Going…

  1. Just a note to editors: “amplificador” in Portuguese means indeed amplifier but in this context, Brazilians actually refer to it as an FM radio (amplifier).

    Other than that, great hack! Juicing 44 hours out an headset is quite astonishing!

  2. It looks really cool but isnt the appeal of bluetooth headphones the lack of cords? I retrofitted my cheapo depo bluetooth stereo headphones that took 2 AAAs with 2 high capacity rechargable AAs and it made a huge difference. Awesome project but impractical for me.

  3. If this guy reads this blog, which I am betting that he does…..

    Decouple all of the components with ceramic caps. Then smooth out the power supply with a large electrolytic or tantalum with a film or ceramic bypass (film is better here). I don’t see any OUTPUT caps, so you need not worry there as usually that is the culprit of many of these BT-headsets.
    The major reason why a bunch of these BT headsets sound so bad is poorly managed power and cheap/bad caps. Although the model in question here is not a fantastic chip to begin with. I would highly recommend getting a model with a CSR BlueCore 5 in it. The nice thing is that the BlueCore5 chips have embedded USB/SPI/UART support so you can actually mess with them and change things easily. One feature of the CSR chips is to make your own filters for the core.

    Once you have the power better filtered (as those charging circuits add more nasty than you think), tune the PCB embedded radio antenna (use a razor to make cuts and copper tape to add). I would also play around with your phone’s BT driver stack as well as your computers to make sure that you are NOT using the SBC codec as it sounds terrible and using the highest bitrate possible.

    Cheers!

  4. Battery with balls! I just put 2 (18650) cells in a handle on the left of a digital camera. It just still fits in a shirt pocket, but runs for hours even taking video.

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