Magnetic Headphone Removable connector Build Log

[NoTxtWhileDrive]

It all started with my Sennhieser HD201, my first decent headphones I bought for myself 4-5 years ago.

 

 

4 DAYS AGO (July 6, 2018)

 

F**cked up is the state I would describe it when I found it in the scrap electronic parts in our attic, after years of neglect on top of being broken in the first place. The whole fixing the headphones thing was a 2 day affair, involving cleaning, disassembling, stripping, designing broken parts in cad, printing said parts on my 3d printer, getting the dimensions wrong and adjust and reprint again, sourcing audio wires and jacks, and actually fixing and assembling it back together.

 

 

The night that I finished it I went on like a fever dream frenzy of constant streams of ideas and concepts lasting from 2-4am, as you do. I've got 3 decent ideas from that trippy, almost hallucinogenic, stream of mechanical/modding/concepts ideas of varying practicality. The one I'm doing first is my idea of a removable cable for the headphones I just fixed.

 

My daily driver headphones right now is a Sony MDR-10rnc it's removable cable is just so convenient to me, frequently leaving my work area to do something else I'd just removed the cable leave with my headphones come back and just plug it back. My first idea of it is just stick a male and female 3.5mm jacks around the part of the wire where it terminates to the two headphones and call it a day, I been always itching to do a magnetically connecting wire design for a while now, looking at my schematic notebooks as far as a year and a half ago... While my earlier attempts fell through, executing it here seems to be a more doable endeavor from the fewer connection points needed. 

My earlier attempt at this concept, (I made some prototypes of this but didn't work out as planned)

 

TODAY (July 10, 2018)

Here's a rough sketch of what I'm aiming to do:

 

 

The main problem I encountered in my first attempt doing something like this is the connection of the wire to the magnet. Involved trying to solder the wire straight up to the magnet, long story short solder doesn't stick well to magnets and the heat conducted by the magnet in the soldering process took away a LOT of it's magnetism.

 

My new Idea is to wrap the magnet with a thin metal sheet, something like an aluminum from a coca-cola can. and screw the wire and the metal sheet together to the housing. I solves my main concern coming it to this new idea by sidestepping the whole issue by not connecting the wire to the magnet at all. This also ensuring good mating because of the metal sheets being sandwiched between the two magnets.

 

 

Here's what I've done so far in Fusion 360. I've done the housing, the wires and how the magnets will be mounted. Completely new to the sheet metal workspace within fusion I'm still feeling out how to do stuff there. I've done this all in the span of about 3 hours. could've done it a lot quickly but I was also half watching "The Smash Bros Documentary" by Samox on youtube along side the cadding work lol. I don't like much listening to music or podcasts while doing cad works and elected to watch a documentary or some other long form video when doing this sorta stuff. My productivity is practically halved, but hey the I'm enjoying myself way more than I should've had.

 

That's all my progress so far. Tomorrow I plan to finalized the design and try to start to print it. Hopefully this project won't last me more than 3 days... Hopefully.

[NoTxtWhileDrive]

7 hours ago, James Evens said:

Where is the problem with off the shelf magnetic USB cables?

One: this is for an Aux cablea not USB, two: Can't find them locally even if I wanted to, and three: Where's the fun in just buying yourself out of problems?