Report on the connectivity part 2 (major milestone again)

Hey backers,

Very interesting stuff happened during this first month of the year.

So as Sylvain predicted, we got a fully functional pair of earbuds that worked flawlessly (woohoo!).

It worked perfectly on Chris… but not on everyone. Sylvain and Hoang (RF specialist) got some disconnects from time to time, which is pretty annoying when you listen to music. Why? Sylvain and Hoang have a deeper ear, so the earbud goes deeper. As a result, the impedance changes which equals to a less stable connection.

Hoang suggested that we tuned the earbuds to match our average customer, which will result inevitably in a portion of backers having some disconnects.

Sylvain & I were definitely not comfortable with this suggestion.

Then Sylvain came up with super interesting ideas to work this problem around:

1. Let’s try to shield the antenna circuit
2. Let’s remove the bandpass filter chip
3. Let’s incorporate some antenna friendly chemical

The results thus far:

1. Shielding the antenna circuit means putting a “tight wrap” of copper around the whole antenna circuit. Results: the plastic shells are putting too much disturbance around the antenna, therefore it’s not a viable option by itself.
2. The function of the bandpass filter chip is to allow a certain frequency (ours is 2.45ghz) and suppress the others. It’s also considered good practice to insert this chip into an antenna (RF) circuit. After careful analysis, we can still make it work really good without this chip. As a matter of fact, it can actually be better performing. Results: still underway, very promising at this point.
3. The main goal is to fix the plastic shell influence with an antenna friendly chemical (totally safe). Results: still underway and going great so far.

We are really excited about these options. Like most of the truly wireless earbuds out there, they have problems to get rock-solid connectivity (unless they are big in the ear or out of the ear). We might have found the recipe to get this right 😀

The Phazon team