Released to the world on Jan 21, 2024
Playing a music on a speaker in public considered rude and obnoxious. So how do throw strangers onto really good music you’ve found while scavenging the internet (Songs that Spotify reccomend and you clicked the like button)? These are the Social Headphones, they display the track details of the current user song the user is listening to onto LCD panels located on the left and right earphones. Additionally this attachment allows for interacting with the spotify player (skipping/reversing track, pausing/resuming playback and liking a song).
1. Building the Social Headphones
The entireity of the project took about three months, starting from a proof of concept on a esp32 dev board to a custom PCB design.
Early Song Viewer Designs
Designing the viewer was probably one of the most fun parts of this project. The early designs were probably some of my favorite especially with the album art blurred in the background, but spotify’s design guidelines killed that option.
Circuit Board
The circuit board was designed using kikad and printed with PCBWay. The experience with each was pretty good. The main processor on the board is an ESP32 since it had wifi and bluetooth built into the board making the final design a lot simplier to produce.
Final Build
The final build includes a 3d printed housing that sits above the original head strap that holds and protects the PCB and the two batteries inside. The headphones have a battery life of about 10 hours.
Future Work
The size of the headstrap is my least favorite detail of this project, this should be greatly reduced to increase aestetics and comfort. This is currently the smallesty it can be with the batteries and the PCB housed inside. I belive this can be all reduced if each display was desinged like a wearable watch, housing the control circuit and the batterie inside. These could then be linked with a single USB-C able that runs between them to sync data and stabilize power between the two devices. This would remove the need for a thick headstrap with only a minor size increase to the LCD Panels. This would also make it an easier attachment for anyone to mod their current headphones to add these features. Additionally there should be a dedicated graphics chip or a chip that is better suited for this to add more flexability with the animations avaible to code on the device, I would really like to work with some 3D stuff.