There are a ton of Bluetooth speakers on the market. Just about none of them have any user-serviceable components or replacement parts available. When they break, they’re dead and gone, and you buy a new one. [Jonathan Mueller-Boruttau] wrote in to tell us about the latest speaker from Teufel Audio, which aims to break this cycle. It’s a commercial product, but the design files have also been open sourced — giving the community the tools to work with and maintain the hardware themselves.
The project is explained by [Jonathan] and [Erik] of Teufel, who were part of the team behind the development of the MYND speaker. The basic idea was to enable end-user maintenance, because the longer something is functioning and usable, the lower its effective environmental footprint is. “That was why it was very important for us that the MYND be very easy to repair,” Erik explains. “Even users without specialist knowledge can replace the battery no problem.” Thus, when a battery dies, the speaker can live on—versus a regular speaker, where the case, speakers, and electronics would all be thrown in the garbage because of a single dead battery. The case was designed to be easy to open with minimal use of adhesives, while electronic components used inside are all readily available commercial parts.
Indeed, you can even make your own MYND if you’re so inclined. Firmware and hardware design files are available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license for those looking to repair their speakers, or replicate them from the ground up. The company developed its own speaker drivers, but there’s nothing stopping you from using off-the-shelf replacements if so desired.
It’s a strategy we expect few other manufacturers to emulate. Overall, as hackers, it’s easy to appreciate a company making a device that’s easy to repair, rather than one that’s designed to frustrate all attempts made. As our own Jenny List proclaimed in 2021—”You own it, you should be able to fix it!” Sage words, then as now!
Finally, companies start getting it
Fantastic! Would be nice to see a BOM there too but great to see step files to make custom designs.
Curious they shared on mynd-hardware Altium and KiCad projects. Are they conversions of do they really created the exact same project on both tools?
Ordered! Very cool color selection as well.
Hear! Hear!
The use a sketchy chinese bluetooth chip “WB-2835p”.
It’s considerably less ‘sketchy’ than a lot of the big name chips because the documentation is available, legally, for download without having to sign some evil NDA or ‘steal’ them and the config tools.
Far more compatible with the OSHW ethos than some Broadcom thing that requires you to sign in blood to get even a register list.
What makes it sketchy exactly?
No information is available. Only a few google results (one of them being this website). And on github I only get one result and that is for this device. No documentation or examples available.
You should disconnect from the internet immediately
They Might Be Hacking Your Bodily Fluids RIGHT NOW!!
Is it 5.0 or above? Stereo?
The chip used is “WB-2835p”. I could only find that it is a BLE 5.3 chip.
So a user-replaceable battery requires (or constitutes…) “open source” now?
What have we become?
We’ve become unable to read, since the design files are ccbysa as well.
“Firmware and hardware design files are available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license”
Seems a bit more than “user-replaceable battery”.
Sure, but so what?
We shouldn’t need “open source” to have a user-replaceable battery.
Touting “Even users without specialist knowledge can replace the battery” as a key feature of “open source” is missing the point.
You’re behind the times. Everything has a user-replaceable battery, you just need more skills than you currently possess. There are entire websites dedicated to battery replacement kits and tutorials for ordinary end-users. I personally replaced my phone’s battery with no prior experience. It took about an hour, which is a lot compared to a snap-in battery like flip phones used to have, but those weren’t waterproof.
Why does a phone need to be waterproof? It all nonsense to be used as an argument for glue-ing it shut. And remove the headphone jack.
Samsung Galaxy S4 (?Sport?) snap in battery and snap off back and still waterproof.
“Everything has a user-replaceable battery, you just need more skills than you currently possess”
If it requires skills and tools average users, or even more experienced users, don’t have, it is not user replaceable. Period.
My first smartphone could have the battery swapped within 10 seconds. No tools required.
When you spin it that way, yes a replaceble battery should be in closed source products too, but i still don’t think the replaceble battery was the main point of this article/product.
Seems like a pretty expensive speaker to have so few audio-related specs obviously published.
I don’t even need another Bluetooth speaker, and I am considering buying this anyway.
+1
Maybe wait for Louis Rossmann to comment first…
Actually looks nice too… well done!
Why’s it gotta look like a lunch box though?
I thought it looked like a classic radio you would have seen in the 1950s-1970s
Seems like you could use a $5-10 ‘Pelican/Apache’ style ABS case ‘ventilated’ as a sturdy enclosure if your vase was damaged or you wanted to build it from scratch.
Neat name. Der Teufel steckt im Detail.
Wondeful to see! Also beautiful to see that a non open source company is able to provide the mandatory native CAD files while supposedly open source companies only share the compiled STEP files. Looks like it’s not that hard, isn’t it?
I’ve hacked on a few that needed some work, so the idea of one with actual documentation is wonderful. One eventually died permanently, and I have to wonder if having a schematic and BoM if I might have dug a little farther into it than “wont power on shrug.”
The first I needed to fix had the tiny pouch cell bite the dust, and while you could still use it plugged into a USB power adapter, the connector broke a short time later. I ended up soldering a power adapter directly to the board until eventually the whole thing just gave up the ghost and died for the last time. Still, it worked for several months, many years after being lost in a box of junk. It at least had easy-to-access screws, though the exterior was coated in that type of rubber that turns sticky after some years. Took entirely too much elbow grease and rubbing alcohol to get clean.
The next one had another dead battery. Once I figured out how to get it open (silicone skin, screws under it), the battery turned out to be an 18500. The original battery had leads tacked onto it, and the replacement was meant for a battery holder and did not have any leads. I ended up taking a couple of large ring terminals, crimping them onto the leads, and then heat-shrinking them onto the battery with some very large heat shrink turned 90 degrees to the battery (openings at the sides, not the ends). The thing worked great for the year and a half that it was needed. It’s been sitting abandoned in a closet since, though I assume it’s still good. If not, I have three more of those batteries waiting to be used.
What I’d really love documentation and parts for, are my Bose QuietComfort 35ii and 45 headphones. Replacement ear cups are easy enough, but finding replacement headbands that aren’t the terrible Velcro or zipper kind is difficult. The QC35ii requires a number of tiny bi-colored wires be desoldered and threaded through the new headband, and then the solder pads give no indication as to which wire goes where. It was a nerve-wracking process hoping I documented it correctly before-hand, that I could actually distinguish all the colors properly, and that I had them in the right order afterwards. I’ve gathered that the QC45 has a connector instead of individual soldered wires, but I’m still waiting on the replacement headband to arrive so I haven’t disassembled it yet to confirm.
My personal pet peeve with all types of bluetooth audio receivers is that the bluetooth module itself is always some kind of generic black box (in this case WB-2835p) sourced from a third party. So there is little control over anything bluetooth related, usually you can’t even set the name of the receiver and if you have several, they’re all named the same generic gibbrish like “BRX815”. Would be really cool to see a truly open source bluetooth audio receiver.