From the horse’s desk: Sennheiser’s Phoneblog update (v2.0)

By Lance Reichert, Sennheiser

It’s been a fun two weeks since we last checked in. We’ve gotten a bit physical in the office and really analyzed the design from a spatial and mechanical, less electronic, perspective. The goal was to be able to hold something in our hand and feel how the user would interact with it. Plus, making a physical thing, even if it doesn’t do anything, makes it easier to convince my boss I’m doing actual work. Strangely enough, surfing the Phonebloks community and stealing - ahem - I mean using - all your ideas makes a less compelling argument.

Anywho, there really is only one hardware specification for a modular phone to date, (looking at you, Project ARA), so we’ve basically taken that spec as our constraints and gone from there.

We’ve focused on the 1x2 module because it’s kind of like the Goldilocks of the various sizes on offer by Google ñ not too big (like the 2x2 module) and not prohibitively small (like the 1x1 module). And of the two possible orientations, the vertical one called to us like a flower to a bee because it lets us place the buttons we’ve talked about last post on the side as opposed to the back which seemed more intuitively obvious because its what phones do now.

We also took a look of possibilities beyond the phone because the whole point of this modular initiative is that this piece of hardware we’re building initially for phones could be usable in many different devices. You can see below we’ve played around with the idea of a modular MP3 player following your ideas from our previous challenges. Even though these are just prototypes to test the form, you can really see (and now we can feel) the modular design concept come to life and it’s really exciting. So, thanks for all your good ideas, gang!

Mock-up of our vertically oriented 1x2 audio module in a modular MP3 player “endo”.

And we’ve played around with some accessories, like speaker arrays for improved output, microphone arrays for improved audio capture and headphones that let you record binaurally as per our last post.

Mock-up of speaker array accessory.

In all of this experimentation, however, we felt really limited by the fact that our device has to have a physical jack on the phone. Again, ARA modules are really tiny and it’s hard to put a jack in there. But the answer is obvious because you guys suggested it ñ make it wireless! It’s funny too because we just so happened to have posted a new challenge around this concept. (I know - weird, right?) Feel free to contribute your thoughts here.

In the next couple of weeks we’ll take what we learned to date and I will rejoin my fellow nerds and return to the electronics lab and start hacking at software. Our goal will be to start playing around with the DSP features we want to offer, coding them up and preparing them for the real world.

Don’t forget to talk all things Sennheiser, Phonebloks and sound on the Phonebloks community forum.