Like the idea of AirPods but find the price tag a little hard to swallow? One clever person decided to make their own – for only $4!
Must read: How tough are Apple's MacBook Pro laptops?[1]
Vice[2] reports how 15 year old Reddit user Sam Cashbook made his own "AirPods" by cobbling together the guts from a cheap bone-conduction headset, attached a larger battery to it, and then connected it all up to an old Apple earbud.
While the results are, well, a little ugly by Apple standards, the homebrew AirPods do work, and even have controls for features such as pausing and skipping tracks, and volume control, and the battery is rechargeable.
It's a cool project, and hats off to Cashbook for making this work, but it's hard to recommend you try to duplicate this project at home. First off, soldering around rechargeable battery cells can be dangerous, as can hot gluing them to circuit boards (using a silicone rubber is safer).
And than taking that contraption and hanging it out of your ears is also something that could go dramatically wrong.
But it's still a cool project!
Would you walk around with these hanging out of your ears? Let me know!
See also:
References
- ^ How tough are Apple's MacBook Pro laptops? (www.zdnet.com)
- ^ Vice (www.vice.com)