{"id":3872,"date":"2016-01-25T02:24:33","date_gmt":"2016-01-25T06:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/?p=3872"},"modified":"2016-01-25T04:06:11","modified_gmt":"2016-01-25T08:06:11","slug":"beyond-unboxing-returns-with-some-season2-shenanigans-axent-wear-kitty-ear-headphones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/?p=3872","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Unboxing Returns with some #Season2 Shenanigans: Axent Wear Kitty Ear Headphones!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It sure feels good to be back doing one of these again! It’s been a while since the last one<\/a>, about little hub motors that you can now buy instead of e-mail me about; since then, they started making EVEN SMALLER ONES<\/a>! Now we’re talking 8wd Chibikart<\/a> Pike’s Peak Hillclimb Edition levels, or the go-kart equivalent of the Human Centipede or whatever. Your tastes might vary.<\/p>\n

On this edition of Beyond Unboxing<\/em>, we explore a product that is so quintessentially me<\/em> for some reason that everyone has felt the need to go “Hey! Have you seen this thing? It’s so totally you!<\/em>“. I’m of course talking about…<\/p>\n

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Little known story: The whole reason my ears existed on Battlebots, and subsequently I became known as “cat ear guy”, was because I made them as a knockoff of Jamison’s<\/a> ears which were a directly inspired knockoff<\/a> of the Axent Wear. See, unlike Jamison, I never finished mine, so they were merely hollow shells<\/a>. Not only that, but I basically brought them as an afterthought – as a “okay, might as well look goofy if needed” accessory stuffed into the very top of my luggage.<\/p>\n

In fact, his knockoffs were so convincing that many people also told him<\/em> that “Dude, you got ripped off!” when they heard of the Axents.\u00a0 Ah, the circle of Internet fame.<\/p>\n

This does seem a little out of the ordinary as something I would just go out and buy, since it’s not some kind of obscure motor controller<\/a> or power tool<\/a>… but there’s a story to that too. Apparently the producers of Battlebots were at CES 2016<\/a>, saw them, and were reminded of me. It helped that (allegedly) the booth personnel were fans of the show. A week later, I had a unit in hand after it was given to them and shipped to me! Awesome. Brookstone, if you want your name on #season2, we need to talk. You guys need to put a liiiiiittle more effort into sponsorship than that, wink wink, but not much more!<\/p>\n

So here we go… Oh boy.<\/p>\n

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Yup. #Season2 will. Be. Insane. Now, those who are genre-savvy with Beyond Unboxing<\/em> posts will know that I pretty much only make these posts if I already have plans for something. In a way, they are a barometer for what I might skulk off to do next. I’ll explain how this ties into the #Season2 (I will pretty much only refer to #Season2 using a hashtag, by the way) plans soon.<\/p>\n

At first, I didn’t really intend to take these apart. But then I was showing somebody, and I dropped them. And then, I only had one side’s lighting left over… uh oh!<\/p>\n

Get ready for some Beyond Unboxing<\/em>, where I take these apart gratuitously in order to see what might have gone wrong with the wiring when they were dropped, and alongside, give a quick tour of consumer product design.<\/p>\n

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Here is the beginning of the presentation. It comes packed in a plain black, non-showy form-fitting zipper case. This is an alien concept to me, since I guess I’ve never owned “nice” headphones in my life until recently when I picked up a HyperX Cloud<\/a> gaming headset secondhand, and it also had a case.<\/p>\n

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Inside the case, the headphone cable and boom mike live on the left, while an included USB micro-B cable for charging is on the right.<\/p>\n

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The unit by itself. Once again, I don’t claim to know anything about nice headphones. I assume they all have this many degrees of freedom!<\/p>\n

I’m not sure if I am a fan of the sound yet. It’s quite “boomy”, reminding me of the times I tried some Beats by Dre – all bass and low end, and nothing spectacular elsewhere. I suppose it fits well with current pop and hip-hop music. Either way, it’s well known that I am a Hipster of the Nth Degree<\/a> when it comes to music, so I explicitly absolve myself of any authority on this matter.<\/p>\n

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A closeup of the lighting effects. The LEDs are clearly white – just the plastic colored ring determines the color of the glow. My issue was that the right-hand side (as pictured, so “left ear) was very sporadic, like a connector was barely hanging on or something.<\/p>\n

For those who haven’t seen these used, the headphones are passively powered via the cord like you’d expect – but the lighting and external speakers (in the ears) are battery-powered, hence it needs periodic charging.<\/p>\n

Let’s start popping stuff apart. First, the earpads can easily be slipped off (I keep wanting to call them “ear poofs”, but they have a name):<\/p>\n

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This exposes four small screws to open the housings.<\/p>\n

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Use a small Phillips driver (I had a #1 – this seems to be correct) to open the housings.<\/p>\n

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Here’s what they look like on the inside. The left side has the audio input and microphone jacks. The signals travel to the other side which contains the amplifier and power supply board.<\/p>\n

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The signal input board is held in by two small screws. I also pulled out the spring clips which give the housings a bit of “detent” feel in their yokes (the forks they’re mounted to) – that’s how they stay in place if you fold them. There’s a small plastic plug that the spring clip mates with that pulls out easily. From there, the housing can be full removed…<\/p>\n

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..If you’re more careful than me. I tried to remove the housing entirely, but I misaliged the other side and broke off the other pin-like structure its mounted to. No consequence, but there will be more sloppy movement as a result. Being more careful instead of pulling harder probably could have avoided this. Alas, the difference between a hub motor and little plastic speakers.<\/p>\n

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Regardless if the housing comes off the yoke or not, the plastic accent ring and cap can be removed from the inside using four screws. Two of these are accessible only if the input board is removed.<\/p>\n

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Check out the LED ring. I plugged the board back in temporarily to show the lighting effect.<\/p>\n

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The LED board is smooth white on top and made of two pieces – the printed circuit board with the LEDs is mounted to the white ring, which is a light-diffusing plastic like what would be used on a LED backlight. This softens the glow and prevents you from seeing discrete LED dots.<\/p>\n

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A little prying and the printed circuit board comes off. The LEDs are a unique side-emitting package<\/a> instead of the far more common top-emitting type<\/a>.\u00a0 The LEDs fire into the internal face of the light-diffusing plastic, causing the ring to glow very evenly.<\/p>\n

This thing has become more hardcore than I had anticipated. I was thinking that there would be an easy way to change the color of the LEDs if needed. Not so much with these – they likely chose white since it can be slightly filtered by the color of the accent ring into any of their colors. Add to that the oddball package needed and your choices are limited.<\/p>\n

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The three components of the lighting accents… or Axents, if you will.<\/p>\n

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Moving to the larger board, the amplifier board – I damaged the battery connector trying to remove it. It’s held in place by a very one-way<\/em> snap\/detent, which I broke before getting the connector to back out. It still contacts fine however. Your experience may vary.<\/p>\n

The other connectors are secured by a small amount of adhesive, but this comes off readily.<\/p>\n

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The amplifier board! I wish I could say something about its design, but it’s not a motor controller. I’ve not worked with audio ICs in the past, so unlike said motor controllers where I can tell you whether or not it’s worth using, the specific implementations of the ICs used are lost on me. All I know is it cannot flow 500 amps.<\/p>\n

I played with searching for their datasheets, however, and in doing so I discovered that some of these are pretty damn obscure. As in, no English-language results worth following up on. I actually had better luck hopping on a Chinese search engine like Baidu. The vast majority of results regardless were trading websites<\/a>, not manufacturer’s datasheets or similar, and they all claim ORIGINAL PART!!!! like it means something. It seems like a lot of these chips are genericized and made by many factories for myriad applications, so you just pick one off the cloud. The same phenomenon gave us Seg-things<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The major ICs listed, which I could track down anyway, are…<\/p>\n