Where's the battery?

[madworm]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/701992503/the-worlds-only-earbuds-with-no-strings-attached

Nice 3D renderings, but where's the battery?

[PA0PBZ]

It sits between the pcb and the earphone, at least that is what they say in the movie.

[madworm]

Really? I thought that was the speaker.

[zapta]

Who needs a battery? It has magnets and crystal clocks.

[Marco]

Misplaced sarcasm.

That said, I wonder what they were thinking sinking this much money into it and then making it completely useless by putting so little memory in it.

PS. I'm pretty sure the round section leading to the speaker is supposed to hold a lithium ion button cell, see 3.20 of the video.

PPS. the bio-compatibility shit makes me hate them though ... they are feeding into FUD to sell their device.

[Branqazwsx]

24 songs?... what the point

[ijchan223]

I agree it does appear to be a button cell at 3:20 in the video.

Side note: Me being audiophile, hearing audiophile quality and 256 mb of storage, i would turn around and run like hell. 

[M. András]

nah its an album in 320kbps mp3

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Also near field across your head? Let's assume the antennas used are electromagnetically short. The metal strips appear to be the antennae, they're a bit under an inch total AFAICT, so about a 4 inch wavelength if they're 1/4 wave dipoles. But that is in a licensed band, to drop it to the 2.4 GHz the antennae need to be a bit longer, so we'll assume they're electromagnetically short. My head is about 6 inches across at the ears, which is into the transition zone for 2.4 GHz (or higher) radiation. So the near field bit seems iffy to me. Either way it's into the Fresnel region, so it's primarily radiative and not reactive.


Also, I have 32GB of music, and I like to listen to pretty much all of it on shuffle. One album in MP3 format is about 150-200 MB, 300+ for FLAC. a music player that stores one album isn't very useful.

[madworm]

They could add a remote control unit that inserts into your nose.

Wiggle your nose once to increase volume, wiggle twice to reduce. To power the device off, sneeze hard.

[tehmeme]

Also near field across your head? Let's assume the antennas used are electromagnetically short. The metal strips appear to be the antennae, they're a bit under an inch total AFAICT, so about a 4 inch wavelength if they're 1/4 wave dipoles. But that is in a licensed band, to drop it to the 2.4 GHz the antennae need to be a bit longer, so we'll assume they're electromagnetically short. My head is about 6 inches across at the ears, which is into the transition zone for 2.4 GHz (or higher) radiation. So the near field bit seems iffy to me. Either way it's into the Fresnel region, so it's primarily radiative and not reactive.

The head will conduct the signals quite well. Don't believe me? try it you'll be surprised.
(putting 2 of my phones to my head trying to get the NFC to work    )

I'm more pissed off that although the general concept is great they had to go and wrap it up with the rubbish about radiation safety, bio-compatibility and a little fairy dust on top.

[Jebnor]

Reminds me of the invasion of the cybermen. Just needs a blue light...

[Stonent]

Now you can tune people out and be annoying even more!

[neggles]

this is almost literally already a product, just about a thousand times more useful.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/04/sennheisers-new-mx-w1-earbuds-get-wireless-with-kleer/
I'd like to think we're all too smart to fall for the "hur dur RADIATION!" idiocy. And 256mb of internal storage in 2013 is just pitiful.
[edit:] They're using NOR flash, not NAND. which might explain the stupidly low capacity. WHYYYYYYYY. [/edit]

Not to mention all the bluetooth headsets that just require one short lead from earbud to earbud. (super tiny li-poly packs woo! like the JayBird EarBuds and Plantronics BackBeat series)

Why....

The sad part is, it'll probably still get funded.

[parabuzzle]

Being a software engineer.. I can't imagine the complexity required to make this actually work and stay in sync when you make changes.. if it really is a passive system that only talks when it needs  to and doesn't have a constant connection. I mean, they better have a way to force a sync between the two buds.. I see a few ways of doing the syncing but they come with problems:

1) you use a TCP style model where you have acknowledgement of packets...
   well, what if the other bud doesn't ack the request? do you fail the request or let it drift out of sync? Or do you retry? When you retry do you block the change until its successful? How many retries? If you block the change, what happens? Does it stop playback (that could get annoying).. does it not apply? (That would be perceived as sluggish from the user's POV)

2) you use a UDP style model where you fire and forget (no ack)...
   one word on failure: "Drift"

Seems dodgy to me really. I would want to wait for a real brand like sennheiser or bose to come out with something like this than back a kickstarter for it. but that's just me.

-Mike

[madworm]

I think they rely on the master clock to be stable and not drift. I also assume they resync on every user interaction and when a new track begins.

[tom66]

Some people listen to audiobooks which can be more than an hour long per file, so I hope it also resynchronises occasionally even when not changing tracks, then again the anti-EMF crowd might get on to them!

[parabuzzle]

ha.. the anti EMF-crowd... the thought of data flowing between the 2 ear buds would have to go through that grey squishy thing between them.. I'm sure they would love that.

-Mike

[garak]

I don't understand why they chose to go the direction they did, it makes no sense. A pair of earbuds with no cabling between them is vaguely appealing. Not being able to use them with any of my current players (phone, iPod, PC etc) is NOT. Having only 256MB of internal space makes them even more binworthy, and potential loss of sync is just the poop icing on this turdcake.

They'd have done far better by just getting these to implement A2DP or even just use a small transmitter on the top of a 3.5mm TRS plug. But then that wouldn't line up with their "RADIATION IS BAD OMGWTFBBQ!!!!" policy.

[pinkysbrein]

You're not going to run that on a button cell. Better to just stream mp3, you could do that over bluetooth low energy.

[mianchen]

Small Bluetooth headphones that can be linked to any devices is a million times better than this

[Dave]

This thing reminds me of the horrible MP3 players that emerged at the dusk of the portable CD player era. I remember my first one had 128MB of memory. An album's worth of music.
Those damn lanyard earphones kept the thing bouncing on your belly when you were walking. Dreadful.