earbuds

11 Articles

Smartphones And The Next Generation Of Hearing Aids

August 18, 2026 by 29 Comments

If you don’t actually need one, you’d be forgiven for thinking a hearing aid just makes everything louder for the wearer. Especially since there are plenty of shady products out there which will do exactly that for just four easy payments of $29.99. But the reality is considerably more complex, as a proper hearing aid needs to be capable of selectively enhancing certain frequencies while squashing down others.

The technical challenges involved in pulling that off in a device small enough to fit inside the human ear and run off of a tiny battery are considerable — and while there’s undoubtedly been some degree of artificial price inflation going on over the years, there’s a reason proper hearing aids have been so much more expensive than their “As Seen on TV” counterparts. These same challenges are also why DIY and open source hardware hearing aids have struggled to gain much traction.

But over the last few years the situation has changed. In 2022 the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) established the framework by which hearing aids could be sold over the counter (OTC). Although they’re generally less capable than their prescription counterparts and not suitable for individuals with profound hearing loss, the wide commercial availability of OTC hearing aids has kicked off a competition between manufacturers to deliver more affordable devices.

That competition entered a new phase earlier this month when the FDA granted approval for Samsung’s Galaxy Earbuds to fall under the same category. This follows a similar decision made about Apple’s AirPods back in 2024. The two biggest players in the smartphone market being able to offer their earbuds as OTC hearing aids represents a unique value proposition. Not only are they priced for mass market consumption, but many individuals who would be interested in purchasing an OTC hearing aid will already own them and need only to enable the feature with a software update.

Given how different the situation is today than even just five years ago it’s worth asking just what qualifies as a over-the-counter hearing aid, and how the shifting definition of these devices can inform the community’s efforts to develop open hardware solutions.

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Running DOOM On Earbuds

January 27, 2026 by 4 Comments

In 1993, DOOM was a great game to play if you had a 486 with a VGA monitor and nothing to do all weekend. In 2026, you can play it on a set of earbuds instead, if for some reason that’s something you’ve always dreamed of doing.

The project comes to us from [Arin Sarkisian], who figured out that the Pinebuds Pro had enough processing power to run one of the seminal FPS games from the 1990s. Inside these earbuds is a Cortex-M4F, which is set to run at 100 MHz. [Arin] figured out it could easily be cranked up to 300 MHz with low power mode switched off, which would come in handy for one main reason. See, the earbuds might be able to run the DOOM engine, but they don’t have a display.

Thus, [Arin] figured the easiest way to get the video data out would be via the Cortex-M4F’s serial UART running at 2.4 mbps. Running the game at a resolution of 320 x 200 at 3 frames per second would consume this entire bandwidth. However, all those extra clock cycles allow running an MJPEG compression algorithm that allow spitting out up to 18 frames per second. Much better!

All that was left to do was to figure out a control scheme. To that end, a web server is set up off-board that passes key presses to the buds and accepts and displays the MJPEG stream to the player. If you’re so inclined you can even play the game yourself on the project website, though you might just have to get in a queue. In the meantime, you can watch the Twitch stream of whoever else is playing at the time.

Files are on GitHub—both the earbud firmware and the web interface used to play the game. It was perhaps only a matter of time until we saw DOOM on earbuds; no surprise given that we’ve already seen it played on everything from receipt printers to cookware. No matter how cliche, we’re going to keep publishing interesting DOOM ports—so keep them coming to the tipsline.

Thanks to [alialiali] for the tip!

A photo of the PCB from the charging case

Anker Soundcore Space A40 Earbuds Teardown

September 7, 2025 by 3 Comments

Wireless earbuds are notoriously tiny. Want to see inside? [MCH170] did and published a Soundcore Space A40 Teardown.

In this teardown, you’ll see inside the charging case and one of the earbuds. Starting with the case, removing the back cover revealed the charging coil and a few screws holding the PCB in place. Removing the screws allows for removing the coil. The main PCB and the magnets that hold the earbuds in place are then visible. The microcontroller is an SS881Q from Sinhmicro. The back side of the main circuit board has a handful of SMD components, including some status LEDs. The battery is a 13450 with a nominal voltage of 3.72V and a capacity of 800mAh or 2.967Wh.

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Wireless Earbuds Charge Themselves

August 11, 2021 by 20 Comments

As more and more ports are removed from our smart devices, it seems that we have one of two options available for using peripherals: either buy a dongle to continue to use wired devices, or switch to Bluetooth and deal with perpetually maintaining batteries. If neither of these options suits you, though, there’s a third option available as [befinitiv] shows us in this build where he integrates a tiny solar panel to his earbud case to allow them to automatically charge themselves.

To start, he begins by taking apart the earbud case. For those who still haven’t tried out a set of these, they typically charge only when placed inside of their carrying case, which in his case also contains a small battery itself. Soldering wires directly to the battery allow for the battery to charge without as much electrical loss as he would have had if he had connected to the USB pins on the circuit board. Even then, the cell only generates a single volt so he needs a 5V boost converter to properly charge the battery. That came with its own problem, though, as it wouldn’t fit into the case properly. To solve that issue, he desoldered all of the components and deadbugged them together in order to fit the converter into a much smaller space without having to modify the case in any other way.

With all of that done and the small solar cell attached to the case, [befinitiv] has a smart solution to keep his wireless earbuds topped up without having to carry cables or dongles around every day. We’ve seen plenty of interesting solutions to the problem of various electronics manufacturers removing the ubiquitous 3.5 mm headphone jack too, and not all of them have dealt with this problem without certain other quirks arising as a result.

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Wireless Earphones And Getting Them Back After They Fall On Tram Tracks

November 13, 2020 by 34 Comments

Over the past years, the trend has become to ditch anything with wires. This has led to many people dropping wired earphones and headphones for wireless (Bluetooth) versions. Yet along with the freedom from having the wires snagged on something and having earphones painfully torn out of your ears comes the very real risk of having them drop out of your ears to land potentially very inconvenient.

In Japan this has led to a big issue for railway companies, where throngs of commuters will often accidentally drop possessions onto the tracks. Staff members will then use a mechanical claw (‘magic hand’) to fetch them without having to risk their life by jumping down. With small items such as wireless earphones, this is however not so easy. With 947 cases of dropped earphones in the period of July-September in just the Tokyo area, this has led to desperate staff members coming up with new methods of easily retrieving the small gadgets.

Solutions range from putting something sticky like tape at the end of a stick, to modifying vacuum cleaners. Most recently Tokyo railway company JR East has collaborated with Panasonic to develop a vacuum cleaner-like device that is especially designed to easily retrieve such small items from the tracks, according to the Japan Times article.

The embedded video (also found after the break) from a Japanese broadcaster describes the issue in detail, along with tips on how to properly wear earphones so that they’re far less likely to fall out when you’re waiting on the tram or walking down the street. While it’s possible to fetch your dropped wireless earphones from the tracks, having someone step on it right after it falls out of your ear on the street is less easy to recover from.

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Wireless Headphone Hack Dangles Batteries Like Earrings

May 21, 2018 by 10 Comments

Koss Porta Pro headphones are something of a rarity in the world of audio gear: they’re widely regarded as sounding great, but don’t cost an exorbitant amount of money. Since the line was introduced in 1984, they’ve been the go-to headphones for those who don’t subscribe to the idea that you should have to take out a loan from the bank just to enjoy your music.

[Jake Bickhard] is a confirmed Porta Pro disciple, owning enough pairs of them that he’s cagey about confirming how many are actually kicking around his home. The only thing he doesn’t like about them is the fact that they’re wired. As it happens, Koss just recently came out with a Bluetooth version of the venerable headphones. But he thought he could do just as well combining a pair of his with a water damaged pair of Bluetooth earbuds he had lying around.

The Porta Pros are easy to take apart, and removing the old wire was no problem. He then cut the “buds” on the Bluetooth earbuds he had, with the intention of just striping the wires and soldering it up to the pads on the Porta speakers. But things didn’t quite go as expected.

What [Jake] hadn’t realized was that the battery for the Bluetooth earbuds wasn’t in the main housing, the power comes from a tiny battery inside each bud. That meant he needed to keep the batteries connected even though the Porta Pro obviously doesn’t have a spot to mount them. In the future he says he’ll address the issue properly, but for now the two batteries hang from the headphones: making it look like he’s wearing the world’s ugliest earrings. But at least he’s happy with the performance of the finished modification, saying they’re even louder now than when they were when wired.

This is a perfect project if you’re cursed with a mobile device that had enough “courage” to take the headphone jack away from you. Though you might first want to study the fine art of soldering headphone wires.

CIPODS: Earbuds For Cochlear Implants

March 7, 2018 by 22 Comments

If you wear cochlear implants, sound doesn’t enter through your ear, but rather from microphones above your ears. That means earbuds are useless and you have to resort to large and clumsy over the ear headphones. [Mjcraig23] wanted the convenience of earbuds and set out to do what we all do: hack it.

The result is handily portable as you can see in the video, below. The trick is that he used replacement battery covers and then grafted earbud holders (called EARBUDi) to them using one of our favorite fasteners, zip ties. Apparently, you can wire a cable directly into the device, but then you lose the ability to hear what’s going on around you, which would not be a good idea for catching some tunes while walking your dog or other common earbud use cases.

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