Ideas for this firmware

[lizz-34]

Open source (okay, this firmware isn't open source yet, but the license issue is being worked out) firmware in earbuds and headphones enables many things. We don't need to limit features to promote the sale of more expensive devices. We can implement all the ideas we want, although of course it takes time and work. The purpose of this thread is to collect the these ideas, which will then be tried to be implemented in the future. Also tell us your craziest ideas, it might be possible!

[lizz-34]

I am a headphone user for many years, and there are no open source solution of True Wireless Headset until the PineBuds released.
That is so amazing. Open source means there will be unique features that is nearly impossible to see in commercial headphones (or only in some overpriced products.)

Some of this features are:

• LDAC Codec.
  Obviously the only way to implement it in a commercial product is to pay license fee to SONY.
  But for the open source world libldacdec is a good choice.

• AptX Codec.
  Only Qualcomm SoCs support it! But wait, really?
  This is more mature, encoding and decoding is supported in GStreamer, Pulseaudio and Pipewire. Plenty of codes and examples.

cfint have added these codecs(also some variants) into ESP32's SDK, ESP-IDF in its fork. I have tried this and it performs very well. That could be helpful for implementing these into the BES2300 SDK.

• Other Codecs, maybe Opus, FLAC...

• Audio record stream
  Almost all bluetooth headset only support playing music in A2DP profile. For recording, you must switch it to HFP profile, and the audio quality is surprisingly low (comparing to wired microphones).
  iFLYTEK's iFLYBUDS Pro/Evernote's EverBUDS implemented this feature by (probably) inventing a proprietary protocol to stream the audio to mobile phone with their (also proprietary) apps.

• Standalone (voice call) audio recording
  Nowadays high-performance bluetooth chips have a large amount of flash memory available. Maybe we can use that to record environment or voice call audio even when the phone is not connected. iFLYBUDS Pro implemented this. Good for Apple users (which does not have a builtin call recording feature).

• Dual connection
  Some really expensive products and some fake Airpods Pros implemented this.
  The headphone can connect two devices simultaneously. But only one device's sound is played at the same time(probably receiving and decoding two streams simultaneously and mix them together requires too much computation power)

• Airpods protocol
  All fake Airpods implemented this. Pretend the device to be a pair of Airpods. Friendly for Apple users.

• 3D rotating sound
  That is probably the easiest to implement: adjusting left and right channel volume by sin(t) and cos(t). No DSP required. Tried on an ESP32, simple but fun.

• More to come...

Originally posted by @happyme531 in #23

[lizz-34]

Support several speakers, headphones and earbuds.

[lizz-34]

Speak to Chat feature.

[lizz-34]

Use standard methods and possible disable and/or build firmware without Airpods protocol support.