You all may have seen or heard about Bone conduction earphones, they are making their hypes now a days trying to replace traditional earphones as in bone conduction you can hear your surroundings while listening to music.

So before going into bone conduction we must look at how sound works. Sound is just “pressure waves” which vibrates its surrounding , it can travel through air or any dense object by vibrating it .when it moves through air pressure waves moves the air particle which further cause our eardrum to move back and forth with air and when sound travel through dense object it cause the object to vibrate.

Now as we know enough about sound, we can move towards bone conduction

Bone conduction is simply a technology in which instead of sound waves travelling through air banging your eardrums it travels through your skulls to the inner ear by vibrating it. So, it is simply the conduction of sound to your inner ear through vibration of your skull bones.

The bone conduction technology can also be helpful for the person with impaired hearing which makes this technology more interesting.

HOW IT WORKS?

So, to understand the working of bone conduction we first need to have a look of our inner ear.

Do not get panic by so many labels I will explain it in a simple way we will only focus on some of the main part of the ears.

Let’s first talk about cochlea (not kokilaben:” Lol”) this part is one of the main parts of the ear which helps to convert sound vibration to nerve impulses that can be processed by our brain. Normally we hear sound by vibration in air that vibrates our eardrum through outer ear and then eardrum vibrate all other organ of middle ear and as soon as the vibration reach cochlea it converts sound vibration to nerve impulses and send the signal to brain.

But the bone conduction skips your eardrum a typical hearing requires vibration of eardrum to vibrate other little organ in your inner ear but eardrum isn’t necessary for hearing.

Bone conduction bypasses your eardrum by sending vibrations directly to inner ear through our skull bones which leads to vibration of tiny organs of our ear and once all tiny bones start to vibrate the cochlea sends the signal to your brain without finding any difference and then you can hear to your favorite songs, podcasts ,etc.

HOW TO MAKE BONE CONDUCTION EARPHONE ?

To make a pair of earphones to experience this technology yourself all we need to do is create vibrations from electrical signals, we can do that with motors or a piezo transducer. Motor works well but it bounces and vibrate so much and are big can’t fit well if we want to make a case for our earphone. So piezo transducer works much better, are small too and they are made for the purpose itself.

REQUIREMENT:

1. 6283 audio amplifier IC
2. A pair of piezo transducers
3. 3.5mm jack for audio source
4. 4. 12v adapter or any other source

I am using 6283 audio amplifier IC because it is commonly used hence easily available in your old DVDs, VCRS, etc. it is a high-power IC but as we are just doing this for test purpose, we can use this (Free IC 😉). You can also use a PAM8403 audio amplifier IC having a 5V operating voltage as it is also very cheap and connection to this IC is easy too.

Another easy alternative can be the use of your old broken set of earphones and cut their ear tip stereo part out and replace them with the piezo transducer by connecting the two wires that comes out when you cut the earphone head apart as shown in sample picture below. And boom your bone conduction earphone is ready, now connect them to your phone and listen the music.

So now as we have discussed some of the alternatives let’s get back to our bone conduction using 6283 audio IC

Now let’s look at the circuit of how to connect all the parts to get our bone conduction earphone ready
So, with the above circuit you will get audio output at the piezo transducer now put the piezo transducer on any part of your skull and you will hear the sound.

“Voila!!! you have your own pair of bone conduction earphone”

You can also place the piezo transducer on a surface and you will be able to hear the sound that’s what you can call any surface speaker. As of now you will not get a good quality sound as are available in commercial one but as it is just for your first experience with bone conduction technology it is great. let’s see what all crazy idea you can come up with using bone conduction. Thank you to bear with this article hope you like it …😊