Hello Element14 community!

I welcome you to my first blog as part of my series about my project which I want to do as part of Upcycle IoT Design Challenge.

In this blog I want to introduce my project.

Broken earbuds

In last 5 years I was buying and using wireless earbugs. While in recent years I use different unit, between 2017 – 2021 I was using following earbuds:

Or actually, I used multiple units of these. These were the cheapest earbugs (~15USD) which I was able to get in local store. I was considering buying better quality (= more expensive) one but once I used these, I did not change. Originally, they were referred as CI-650, later units were CI-1068. From practical point of view CI-650 and CI-1068 look exactly the same, later after opening them I found that the only difference is Bluetooth antenna cost-cutting. CI-650 has PCB antenna while CI-1068 has chip antenna.

The problem is that their lifespan is not very good. Due to mechanical strength on cables, cable to one of their earbuds sooner or later break and they become useless. As you can see cable lengths are asymmetrical and practical usage shown that short wire is more sensitive to damage caused by mechanical stress, but sometime longer cable failed also.

Because they were the cheapest, I did not worry about it very much. I refunded some utilizing store-provided warranty (which EU law make very generous), received some replacement for broken units and in some cases I just bought new one. Once I have multiple broken units, I also attempted DIY fix. I basically disassembled two broken units and moved working earbud (ie. Desoldered and soldered) to another unit for making one unit fully working (while the other fully malfunctional). This prolongs lifespan a little, but because of DIY way of opening and not very good strain relief, they quickly failed once more.

In 2022 they stopped selling them because expense on refunds and replacements was too high, I guess. One store where I was buying them mention failure rate 43%. If you do not trust me, check it yourself:

https://www.czc.cz/connect-it-ci-1068-cerna/196604a/produkt

Last parameter “Spolehlivost” means Reliability in English.

It is horrible amount of electronics waste caused by bad design of mechanical parts.

But of course, I did not throw them away, but instead I opened them, analysed them and store them in bin for future use – which happens now.

In the next blog I will show them open, and even more, I will show reverse engineered schematics!

Next blog:  Blog #2: Earbuds internals