Upcoming PineSound Offers an Open Bluetooth Audio Dev Experience — Exemplified in the PineBuds
Community-driven effort will provide high-quality noise-canceling headphones with open firmware and a development board, too.
PINE64, the company best known for its open-hardware smartphone and laptop designs, has announced a new development board and planned product launch: the PineSound, designed for digital audio projects, and the PineSound-based PineBuds noise-canceling Bluetooth earbuds.
"The PineSound board [is] a development platform for earbuds and a digital audio player, utilizing the Bestechnic BES2300 Bluetooth 5.0 audio chip," explains PINE64's Lukasz Erecinski of his company's latest design, which he describes as "community-driven."
The board includes two coaxial and optical digital audio inputs and outputs, a 3.5mm headphone jack for analog audio input and output, 4.4mm and 2.5mm balanced audio jacks, an SMA connector, USB Type-C, connectivity for touchscreen and plain-LCD displays, and a number of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins besides.
"As we did with PineTime [open-hardware smartwatch], we will allow the development community to help set the course of the PineSound project," Erecinski says. "All important decisions, such as moving from development to production, the production itself, opening sales, etc, will be coordinated and discussed with the community."
That doesn't mean that PINE64 itself doesn't have plans for the board, though: The company has already announced its first commercial design built using the platform, the PineBuds wireless Bluetooth earbuds. "They offer features found on high-end in-ear headphones," Erecinski claims, "such as ambient and environment noise cancelation and long battery life. They have six microphones total, three on each bud, as well as touch-based input situated on the external side of each bud."
The buds will also, as you would expect, be open hardware. "We designed the cradle, which houses the earphones so that custom user-created firmware can be flashed," Erecinski explains.
"The cradle has built-in UART used for firmware flashing, which is automatically exposed when it is connected via USB to a computer. There will be a wide variety of things developers and (eventually) end-users will be able to do with the earbuds – flash custom sound signatures, determine touch controls, adjust resonance to fit the user’s ear canal resonance and even turn the PineBuds into hearing aids."
It may be a while before the general public can play with the new hardware, though: Erecinski explains that the initial batch of development boards will be provided to existing community developers, before being opened up to all "in time."
More information on both the PineSound and the PineBuds, along with progress reports on PINE64's other projects, is available on the company blog.