Solar-powered headphones

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63211086

by adrian_mrd • 4 years ago

51 102 4 years ago

superkuh• 4 years ago

No. The available surface area is too low.

We’re not talking about powering a car here. Most headphones have a tiny tiny energy draw to maximise the energy of their tiny lightweight battery.

mthomasmw• 4 years ago

'Currently the tech can create one hour's worth of power "from just 20 minutes of English or Swedish summer sunshine".'

LightG• 4 years ago

So ... 20 minutes use per year.

Nice.

TOMDM• 4 years ago

From the article:

"The solar-powered headphones still have a built-in battery that can power up to 80 hours of playback time. It is this that the Powerfoyle strip charges. Mr Fili says that currently the tech can create one hour's worth of power "from just 20 minutes of English or Swedish summer sunshine"."

A very bold claim, I do wonder if that's with the strip placed optimally facing the sun, and not integrated into a headset.

The idea of a solar jacket to keep a hikers satellite phone topped off sounds more attractive though.

abdullahkhalids• 4 years ago

Back of the envelope calculations.

Assume:

* solar panel is about 1.5cm x 20cm = 0.003m^2

* Efficiency = 10%

* solar insulation is 1000W/m^2

Power = 0.3W

In 20 min you gain, 0.3x1/3=0.1Wh of energy.

Now, these random Sony headphones [1] have 30h life with a battery of 3.7V, 1200mAh [2]. This means they consume 3.7*1200m/30 = 0.148Wh per hour.

Seems like claim is roughly in the ballpark.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0863TXGM3 [2] https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08YQX76B1

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

Summer sunshine is also like an order of magnitude more W/m^2 than overcast winter day, at least up north.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

depends on what kind, you could have head-band style with thin film over the surfaces and low power in ear transducers, i'd probably buy none (granted the pv film doesn't degrade in a year)

which reminds me that I regularly find old PV pocket calc, with I forgot what kind of oxide they used, still working fine..

UncleOxidant• 4 years ago

Solar hats. The next must-have.

syntaxing3• 4 years ago

How often do people use their headphones outdoors? I would be very surprised if the average time outdoor over the lifetime of a headphone to be over 5%.

metadat2• 4 years ago

The article states that the kind of PV charger they're using works under any light source, including artificial lighting.

It's about half as efficient at converting light into electricity as current best rooftop panels, and these ones are way thinner.

teraflop4• 4 years ago

OK, but efficiency at converting light into electricity doesn't mean much if the total amount of light available for conversion is very low -- which it is in almost all indoor situations.

The illumination level in a brightly-lit office is typically on the order of 300 lux, compared to 100,000 lux for direct sunlight. (Residential spaces are often even dimmer.) So if, as they claim, this device can gain 1 hour of charge in 20 minutes in direct sunlight, it would take on the order of 100 hours to collect the same amount of energy indoors.

The statement that "the panels can also create some power from artificial light" is technically true, but "some" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

syntaxing3• 4 years ago

The physics just doesn’t work that way. Our sun produces about 11MW/m^2 (changes significantly due to atmospheric conditions) but there is no artificial lighting that will even be 0.0001% of those number.

adrianN• 4 years ago

My whole room is lighted by maybe 20W of LEDs, so it gets what, 5W of light? Very few of those Watts hit the solar panel.

eyelidlessness• 4 years ago

Depends on the person I guess? Or maybe how much time they spend walking. I used to use headphones almost exclusively while walking, and generally only used stereo speakers at home. I don’t listen to anything while walking these days because I’m generally paying full attention to my pup, music would be an unwanted distraction. But I do see lots of other people wearing headphones while we’re out walking. And I don’t have that stereo anymore, I generally only use my MBP’s built in speakers at home now. I really don’t like wearing headphones at all though.

hnlmorg4• 4 years ago

Indoor solar powered devices have existed for decades (like calculators). The article even explicitly states that these can be charged from indoor light.

teraflop4• 4 years ago

Sure, there are pocket calculators that can run off of ambient indoor lighting, but they have to be designed to run on a truly miniscule energy budget -- on the order of a fraction of a milliwatt.

dmd• 4 years ago

I wear headphones constantly outdoors (walking/running) but can’t recall the last time I had them on indoors. If I’m indoors I’m using good speakers.

SteveGerencser• 4 years ago

I use headphones exclusively outside on our farm. All of the equipment makes a lot of noise and decent headphones help with the noise. And because my wife gets the 'new tractor' with a cab, radio, and AC, I get the 'old tractor' and get to sit out in the sun from sun up to sun down during hay cutting 3 or 4 times a year. I've yet to have a pair of headphone last a full day. This could be cool and keep me from having to keep 3 pairs on hand.

I freely admit that I am an outlier, but I'm used to people not understanding that a large segment of the popular leads totally different lives with totally different needs than most people.

oneplane3• 4 years ago

You'd think someone would have come up with some form of auxiliary power pack for headphones, maybe one of those dual-battery solutions where you have a small cell on either side and can replace them in turns to keep it nice and balanced while still being able to keep using it all day long. Maybe the market is too small, or it already exists and we don't know about it yet.

syntaxing3• 4 years ago

I think the last part is important though “large segment of the popular leads totally different lives”. That’s mainly why I said average, I’m more than happy to be proven wrong but if your statement is true, the statistics will show it. Like if the average is 5% outdoor +/- 2%, then it’s obvious that a large segments doesn’t necessarily have a different need.

aikendrum• 4 years ago

There are lots of (expensive) headphones that will last 30 hours or more of playback, including the excellent Sony mx 1000 line. They have great noise cancellation, and older versions are often on sale for a significant discount.

OJFord2• 4 years ago

I only use earphones, just because I find it more comfortable, but almost exclusively. I have no (extremely little) need for them indoors, I (almost always) prefer speakers there.

closewith2• 4 years ago

I guess I'd say that's a reasonable estimate for time spent outside as a percentage of total time, but of time in use, I'd imagine that could be off by an order of magnitude. Probably depends where you live and the weather outside.

teamonkey• 4 years ago

I don't mean to be blunt, but am I right in saying that you are from the US?

I ONLY wear my headphones outside. I bought them especially for commuting to work on public transport and walking to the shops. That doesn't seem unusual where I'm from. A lot of people wear their headphones outside.

I mean, I also have a headset at my desk for calls, but that's not what these are for.

astura2• 4 years ago

Eh? Most people use speakers at home instead of headphones and most indoor time is spent at home. So I'd imagine plenty of people use speakers outdoors.

I, personally, exclusively use headphones and I still use my headphones outside all the time - while walking, working outside, gardening, snow shoveling, etc. Even just relaxing.

FrankTheDank• 4 years ago

The quicklook of these on LTT was pretty favorable. They actually seem pretty neat. I prefer earbuds for running though so not for me. Like the idea though

gw99• 4 years ago

I didn’t know BBC were running adverts these days…

_-_-__-_-_-• 4 years ago

That was my first thought as well. It will be interesting to see future applications of this technology. If they can get the costs down and the charging is actually efficient enough, it'll be worth it.

pengaru• 4 years ago

Never heard of Top Gear?

taspeotis• 4 years ago

https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/commercial-services#...

waterpowder• 4 years ago

And as always... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

akamaka4• 4 years ago

How powerful of a computing device could be powered by a small solar panel these days?

We had solar powered calculators in the 1980s, but with chips being so much more energy efficient now, I imagine we could build a much more impressive device with no battery.

alar44• 4 years ago

Not really. To power an Arduino you need a much bigger solar panel than a calculator. Those calculators aren't necessarily inefficient, they just hardly do anything at all. You really can't do much more with a solar panel that size, it hardly captures any energy.

Retric• 4 years ago

Arduino’s are very power hungry compared to low power electronics. RFID tags for example are extremely low power.

That said, there are solar powered scientific calculators which have dramatically more computing power and much larger displays than what people think of a solar calculators and still operate indoors at low light levels. Ex: TI-36X Pro

A modern redesign could probably probably get ~1 GFLOPs, but those things are more designed for standardized tests than to be a useful tool.

etrautmann• 4 years ago

logitech used to get away with solar cells on the K750. It did sometimes die if left without much light but I was impressed it could operate as well as it did without direct sunlight.

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

The Microchip brand micro in the arduino wouldn't be the right choice here. Something like the TI MSP430 would, it runs on very very low power requirements and has sleep functions that have insanely low power draw.

chernofool• 4 years ago

You could probably get 2W from a wide over-ear band in direct sunlight. Maybe that's 2-4 hours per day, with indirect light scattered around the day.

If you get say, 2W*6h=12Wh/day, you could afford about 15mA/hr @3.3V. That might be able to power a set of wireless headphones with a reasonably-sized battery, if you left them on a windowsill in direct sunlight when you weren't using them.

Modern designs will probably use monocrystalline cells, but old solar-powered calculators used amorphous cells. Those are less efficient, but they can recover a trickle of energy from weaker light sources such as indoors or cloudy days.

I also wonder what sort of materials they'll use. Plastics don't usually handle excessive UV exposure well.

LeoPanthera• 4 years ago

Calculators are kind of a special case. When you are not pressing a button they are doing literally nothing, and maintaining the state of the LCD takes only microwatts.

They use so little power that many "solar" calculators are fake, the "solar panel" is decorative only and a hidden button cell battery provides a decade of battery life: https://youtu.be/uLTDuGhqE2w

swagasaurus-rex• 4 years ago

My childhood would have been so much more boring if I couldn't starve my calculator of light and watch the screen get dim

astura2• 4 years ago

Is fake solar powered calculators a new thing or am I misremembering my childhood? I remember entertaining myself[1] by covering the solar cell and watching the screen go blank.

Edit: nvm, YouTube comments and even a sibling comment to this mentioned the same thing, my childhood memories are real. After watching the YouTube video the guy took apart five calculators and only 2 had fake solar cells, so not what I expected.

[1] yeah, pre Internet entertainment was boring in comparison.

bawolff• 4 years ago

Dont (non active noise cancelling) headphones already not use any power?

fshbbdssbbgdd• 4 years ago

Wired headphones get power from whatever they are plugged into.

Once you decide you don’t want to physically connected to the grid while wearing the headphones, you’re going to carry a battery around (or generate power with solar or something). If you’re also carrying some additional device (eg. a phone or mp3 player) along with the headphones and you’re wired into that device, you could have that device handle the power.

Nowadays I’m frequently switching my listening and speaking between different devices, some of which are on my person and some aren’t. So plugging the headphones whatever I’m currently using would be inconvenient and restrict my freedom of movement. Therefore it’s nice to have for the headphones to contain their own battery and do automatic switching between different input devices.

Solar sounds like a gimmick to me, the battery life of the headphones is not any issue anymore.

oneplane3• 4 years ago

Only if they are wired. The article is about wireless headphones and people forgetting to charge them. It's a bit advertorial-ish because this is exactly the product that a brand has launched just now.

Technically it could help but just like solar-powered garden lights, it's a race you can't win with ambient light.

If someone were to find an amazing headmounted-solar-power-source, it would have to be so good you'd be able to charge your mobile devices with it (or you'd have to walk in the sun all day long to keep it going and have enough of a charge for the night).

autoexec• 4 years ago

Yeah, since you're already listening to something using a powered device it'd certainly be far better for the environment to not add another toxic battery in your headphones and just plug them into whatever your listening to.

user_named• 4 years ago

I have the first version of those Adidas headphones, that do not come with the solar panels but are otherwise the same.

I wear them 8 hours per day at the office, at the gym, while jogging etc. Light and stay on your head well. Highly recommended.

The new version looks to be twice the cost so I don't think I'll upgrade anytime soon but I'd probably get them if these fail out of warranty.

noipv4• 4 years ago

https://miscircuitos.com/lab-characterization-of-the-solar-c...

bArray• 4 years ago

In the UK, where the BBC is hosted, solar-powered headphones are mostly a waste of time. It rains a lot and you spend a lot of time avoiding being outside. Most people are at work when the sun is highest in the sky. As others point out, most people can get through the whole day on one charge.

It would be much more efficient to put solar-panels where they can maximize their potential energy output and instead just charge normal headphones from renewable sources. Bare in mind that the creation of the solar panels themselves has a carbon offset that the application of headphones is unlikely to recoup.

alpaca128• 4 years ago

I think I've only seen two kinds of devices where an integrated solar panel actually made sense: calculators as their power draw is so low the one I bought almost 20 years ago for school still works with the original (non-rechargeable) battery. And more recently a GPS sports watch which can extend the battery life with solar for hours, or days when GPS isn't used.

Other than that I agree, if you compare the power output to roof-mounted ones it seems quite pointless. Even relatively large, unwieldy USB charging panels you need to unfold can't hold up considering their area.

ajb• 4 years ago

Looks quite handy on a USB power bank:

https://www.revk.uk/2022/09/battery-pack.html?m=1

"Obviously these various battery packs were now all flat. One of the reasons for a battery back is for when you suddenly find you need portable power for something like this.

All flat, except one!

I can only assume it was getting enough light from my office lights, even in a clear plastic box, to actually stay charged."

That is, not to charge the power bank (which would take ages) but to keep it charged during storage.

gruturo• 4 years ago

You reminded me of something I was considering years ago: screens have incredible resolution (DPI) now, and still growing. Some technologies are based on a backlight and a mask which blocks it in the right spots to form the picture (LCD, LED Backlight) while others actively emit the right colors at every location (OLED, MicroLED).

At some point it would be pointless to keep increasing DPI due to being higher than any healthy person can resolve at a typical distance - but what if we do keep shrinking the emitting elements but arrange them more sparsely (same amount of pixels, but each one is super tiny) - and use the rest of the space for what is effectively a solar panel?

Completely stupid, or did I think of something reasonable? I could see this as a benefit especially on phones, tablets and watches (maybe glasses, absorbing invisible frequencies).

My usual beer clause applies: If anyone builds it successfully and makes millions with it, and this post ends up the earliest mention of the idea, you owe me a beer.

maratc2• 4 years ago

Or maybe someone could invent headphones that are powered by the sound-outputting device and don't have any battery at all. The signal could be transferred by a wire, for example.

closewith2• 4 years ago

I'm sure there are plenty of wired options for those who want them, but for me, at least, the experience of good wireless headphones is so much better than I'll never go back.

LandStander• 4 years ago

I like this idea. To take it even further, I propose this wire terminate to a sturdy cylindrical plug which can rotate 360 degrees. Furthermore, if the signal were to be analog, it would allow universal compatibility with all other analog sound devices. I think this could be revolutionary.

dzhiurgis• 4 years ago

Given how much money we spend on frivolous tech (and other) products… we should be by now producing 300% of our power via solar.

ChrisRR4• 4 years ago

The UK isn't very rainy, it's only the 74th rainiest country. The issue is how many days are overcast

ben_w• 4 years ago

I have no idea how much headphones normally draw, so I googled and the first replacement battery I found was for the Bose QuietComfort 20, and the product listing for the battery said 240mAh/3.7V (which is 0.888 Wh) while the product listing for the headphones said "lasts 16 hours", implying 55.5 mW.

At 10% efficiency, a 3cm by 10cm PV in direct sunlight will produce 0.3 W, enough to fully charge that in about 3 hours, and the potential for charging faster than it drains whenever ambient light is at least 18.5% of direct sunlight.

Indirect sunlight on a clear day is about that at best; Overcast days are about 1% of direct sunlight; Normal office lighting is about 0.3-0.5% of direct sunlight.

So, a 1 hour lunchtime walk on a sunny day while using them, would likely be somewhere between neutral and recharging by 4 hours 20 minutes.

That said, I have no reason to expect Bose (first random search result) to optimise for minimal power draw, given how small and light the battery is and still gets 16 hours, and I don't know if there's room for improvement with these in that regard.

parski• 4 years ago

The density of e-waste goes up.

quicon• 4 years ago

I bought the Urbanista headphones mentioned in the article. That was 6 months ago, I've used them daily indoors for meetings and listening to music, and I had to charge them with a cable only once in those six months. My desk is by a window and I live in Barcelona, so the headphones get quite a lot of indirect sunlight. Still, they feel like magic to me.

lakomen• 4 years ago

Why does no one create solar powered Smartphones though?

ChrisRR4• 4 years ago

The amount of power required by a smart phone massively exceeds the amount of power that can be supplied by the area available

nigerianbrince• 4 years ago

Coming up next, headphones that are powered by the bobbing of your head.

ChrisRR4• 4 years ago

Not a completely unfeasible idea. Kinetically wound/charged watches have been a thing for decades

ChrisRR4• 4 years ago

Remember when headphones were wired and didn't need power?

ChuckNorris89• 4 years ago

I do. But the biggest e-waste manufacturers in the world (Apple, Samsung, etc.) decided they can now sell you Bluetooth earbuds too, so removing the jack was a nice nudge to force you to buy more of their e-waste.

I'm not against Bluetooth earbuds but I'm against removing the jack.

mnw21cam• 4 years ago

Ok, but let's not fool ourselves that this is to save the mains electric grid from the power used to charge these things. This is for convenience, not environmentalism.

The amount of power used by headphones is tiny. Which is lucky, because the amount of power that a small inefficient solar cell like that can collect in artificial lighting is tiny as well. For reference, my Bose noise-cancelling headphones use something on the order of a tenth of a Watt. My microwave oven uses 5W just to keep the clock flashing "--:--".

I have a 14-year old wristwatch, which is solar powered. I haven't had to change a battery in it ever. It's convenience, and it's neat, but that's it.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

This isn’t necessarily the full picture.

Whenever I see efficiency gains, I tend to look for reductions in materials utilizations, and sometimes I might find a case for environmentalism (on some axis).

I work in the technical area that enables flexible solar panels to exist at large volume (replacing energy intensive rigid glass with flexible barrier films). The manufactures of these headsets note that it allows for a larger volume reduction in batteries when integrated across 100,000s units compared to the addition of the panel itself.

Also, the technology supports the global supply chain to continue to lower the cost of PV which is good for the environment.

An eventual goal is the ability to quickly unroll massive installations of PV on rooftops that are as durable as the roof itself.

yellowapple• 4 years ago

Around 10 years ago Logitech sold solar-powered wireless keyboards (maybe they still do). They were pretty nice, and not having to deal with wires or batteries ever is something I miss now that I've switched over to mechanical keyboards.

Hopefully the "make everything solar powered" idea catches on at some point. I feel like solar-powered phones and tablets with e-ink displays should exist by now.

Solar-powered headphones

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