Bypassing Airpods Hearing Aid Georestriction With A Faraday Cage

November 15, 2024 by Maya Posch 50 Comments

When Apple recently announced the hearing aid feature on their new AirPods Pro 2, it got the attention of quite a few people. Among these were [Rithwik Jayasimha] and friends, with [Rithwik] getting a pair together with his dad for use by his hard-of-hearing grandmother. That’s when he found out that this feature is effectively limited to the US and a small number of other countries due them being ‘regulated health features’, per Apple. With India not being on the approved countries list and with no interest in official approval legalities, [Rithwik] set to work to devise a way to bypass this restriction.

As noted in the blog post, the primary reason for using AirPods here instead of official hearing aids is due to the cost of the latter, which makes them a steal for anyone who is dealing with mild to moderate hearing loss. Following the official Hearing Aid feature setup instructions requires that your location is detected as being in an approved country. If it is, the Health App (on iOS 18.1) will popup a ‘Get Started’ screen. The challenge was thus to make the iOS device believe that it was actually in the FDA-blessed US and not India.

Merely spoofing the location and locale didn’t work, so the next step was to put the iOS device into a Faraday cage along with an ESP32 that broadcast California-based WiFi SSIDs. Once the thus treated iPad rebooted into the US, it could be used to enable the hearing aid feature. Next [Rithwik] and friends created a more streamlined setup and procedure to make it possible for others to replicate this feat.

As also noted in the blog post, the Hearing Aid feature is essentially a specially tuned Transparency mode preset, which is why using AirPods for this feature has been a thing for a while, but with this preset it’s much better tuned for cases of hearing loss.

Two hands hold a rounded rectangular case with a small lollipop-shaped cutout. The case is dark grey with a bit of white protruding between the two halves in the middle.

Add USB-C To Your AirPods The Easy Way

October 3, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 8 Comments

While the death of Apple’s Lightning Connector can’t come soon enough, swapping the ports on their products as “category-defining innovations” seems a bit of a stretch. [Ken Pillonel] has designed a set of streamlined, repairable, USB-C adapters for the AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max that show Apple what innovation really means.

If you’ve followed [Pillonel]’s work in the past, you’ll know he’s as a big a fan of repairability as we are here, so this isn’t just a cheap knockoff dongle that’ll be in the trash as fast as your counterfeit wireless earbuds. In the video below, he walks us through his quest start-to-finish to design something compact that gives you all the joys of USB-C without the pain of buying a whole new set of headphones.

We like the iteration on the connector, showing that flexible circuits can do some amazing things, but are still subject to failure at extreme angles. Using a combination of 3D printing, a cool robot sandblasting machine, a pick-and-place, and some old fashioned hand soldering, [Pillonel] treats us to a polished final product that’s put together with actual screws and not adhesive. His designs are all open source, so you can DIY, or he sells finished copies in his shop if you want to give one to your less-than-techy relatives.

[Pillonel] may seem familiar as he’s the guy who added USB-C to the iPhone before Apple and redesigned the AirPods Pro case for repairability. Apple is getting better about repair in some of its devices, for sure, but unsurprisingly, hackers do it better.

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Apple May Break Into The Hearing Aid Industry

September 17, 2024 by Jenny List 33 Comments

When the entry of a tech giant such as Apple into a market represents its liberation from exploitation, that market must be really broken, yet the reported FDA approval of the hearing aid feature in the latest AirPod earbuds seems to represent just that. The digital hearing aid business is notorious for its sharp sales practices and eye-watering prices, so for all Apple’s own notoriety the news might actually represent a leap forward for consumers in that sector. We have to ask though, if Apple of all people are now the Good Guys, where has the world of electronics gone so badly wrong?

Your grandparents decades ago would have had a simple analogue hearing aid if they had one, usually a small transistor circuit and perhaps with some kind of analogue filtering. Digital aids with DSP algorithms to pick out speech arrived some time in the 1990s, and from there evolved a market in which their high prices increasingly didn’t match the cost of the technology or software involved. At least in the UK, they were sold aggressively to older people as less cumbersome or better than the National Health Service aids, and if you had an older person in the family it was routine to see pages and pages of targeted junk mail offering dubious financial schemes to pay for them.

The question then, given that a modern hearing aid has a relatively cheap microcontroller and DSP at its heart, why has the open source community not risen to the challenge? The answer is that they have, though the Tympan seems an over-expensive trinket for what it is and the LoCHAid and Open Speech Platform seem to have sunk without trace. Can we do better?

Header: Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0 .

An exploded view of an AirPods Pro case. The outer case consists of two long, capsule-shaped sections that enclose several smaller parts including the wireless charging cable, contacts for charging the AirPods themselves, and the top rounded protective piece for the buds that nestles into the top capsule. This version includes screws to fasten everything together instead of adhesives.

Fixing Some More Of Apple’s Design Mistakes

August 2, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 26 Comments

Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that Apple has strayed from the Woz’s original open platform ideal for the Apple II. [Ken Pillonel] is back for another round of fixing Apple’s repairability mistakes with a full complement of 3D printable replacement parts for the AirPods Pro case.

While modeling all of the parts would be handy enough for repairing a device with a 0/10 iFixit score, [Pillonel] modified the parts to go together with screws instead of adhesive so any future repairs don’t require cracking the plastic egg. He says, “By showcasing the potential for repairability, I hope to inspire both consumers and multi-billion dollar companies, like Apple, to embrace sustainable practices in their products.”

[Pillonel]’s repairability exploits may seem familiar to readers from his previous work on adding USB-C to the iPhone and the AirPods Pro case. If you just need to retrieve a lost AirPod, you might try an electromagnet, or you can make a Bluetooth receiver from a pair of knock-off buds.

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A closeup of a black flexible PCB with an out-of-focus quarter in the background, approximately the same size as the end of the PCB we're looking at. One the right is a USB C connector and to its left are two SMD components with visible pins. Several smaller SMD components (resistors or caps?) are soldered to other parts of the board.

Making The AirPods Pro Case Repairable

February 13, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 8 Comments

Apple is often lauded for its design chops, but function is often sacrificed at the altar of form, particularly when repair is involved. [Ken Pillonel] has made it easier for everyone to replace the batteries or lightning port in the AirPods Pro case. (YouTube)

With such notable hacks as adding USB C to the iPhone already under his belt, [Pillonel] has turned his attention to fixing the notoriously poor repairability of AirPods and AirPods Pro, starting with the cases. While the batteries for these devices are available, replacement Lightning ports are not, and taking the housing apart for the case is an exercise in patience where the results can’t be guaranteed.

He designed a USB C replacement port for broken Lightning ports that is a perfect fit if you happen to get the case apart in one piece. If you’re less successful, he has you covered there too with a 3D printable enclosure replacement.

We sure miss the days of schematic proliferation here at Hackaday, but we know you don’t let glued enclosures or unobtainium parts stand in the way of repairs.

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Knock-Off AirPods Merged Into Bluetooth Receiver

August 31, 2018 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Whether or not you personally like the concept of the AirPod Bluetooth headphones is irrelevant, as an Apple product one thing is certain: all the cool kids want them. That also means that plenty of overseas manufacturers are pumping out janky clones for a fraction of the price for those who are more about the Apple look than the Apple price tag. Are they any good? No, of course not. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do something interesting with them.

[Igor Kromin] took apart a pair of fake AirPods and was predictably underwhelmed. So much so that he didn’t even bother putting the things back together. Instead, he took the two poor Bluetooth audio receivers and combined them into one slightly less poor Bluetooth audio receiver. It probably doesn’t meet the classical definition of a “good” use of time and/or money, but at least he got some entertainment out of a product that was otherwise destined for the trash.

As you might imagine, the left and right “AirPod” each has its own battery, Bluetooth receiver, and speaker. It has to, as they have no physical connection to each other. That also means that each receiver is only playing one channel, making them useless individually. What [Igor] realized was that he could put together a little PCB that combines the two audio channels back into a regular stereo 3.5 mm audio jack.

While he was at it, he also wired the individual buttons on each headphone to a center button on the PCB which would allow him to physically synchronize them. Even still, [Igor] mentions that occasionally they don’t come on at the same time. But what do you expect for something that’s nearly a 20th the price of the original?

The last time we saw a hack related to the Apple AirPod, it was when somebody threw them out the window, so one might presume most hackers prefer their iDevice tethered.

Fishing For AirPods With Magnets

July 30, 2017 by Dan Maloney 35 Comments

Note to self: if you’re going to hack at 4 in the morning, have a plan to deal with the inevitable foul ups. Like being able to whip up an impromptu electromagnetic crane to retrieve an AirPod dropped out a window.

Apartment dweller [Tyler Efird]’s tale of woe began with a wee-hours 3D print in need of sanding. Leaning out his third-story window to blow off some dust, he knocked one AirPod free and gravity did the rest. With little light to search by and a flight to catch, the wayward AirPod sat at the bottom of a 10-foot shaft below his window, keeping company with a squad of spiders for two weeks. Unwilling to fork over $69 and wait a month and a half for a replacement, [Tyler] set about building a recovery device. A little magnet wire wound onto a bolt, a trashed 100-foot long Ethernet cable, and a DC bench supply were all he needed to eventually fish up the AirPod. And no spiders were harmed in the making of this hack.

Need to lift something a little heavier than an AirPod? A beefy microwave oven transformer electromagnet might be the thing for you. And confused about how magnets even work in the first place? Check out our primer on magnetism.

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