Hacking Headphones

I love speakers, but actually have not done much with them. I have several, but I have always loved listening to music or audio with headphones. One thing I once tried to do is make headphones produce sound that I programmed, and I am going to explain how I did it to you. It is actually very easy.

Of course, the obvious solution is to buy a 6$ headphone jack piece for a breadboard, but I wanted to make my own. The next obvious solution is to set wires to each of the metal bands on the end, and that is just what I did.

First, let’s look at the end. Most have three bands of metal on them, for ground, right audio, and left audio. The top is ground, the middle is right, and the bottom, or the tip, is left.

To successfully recreate sound on the pair of headphones, we need only to solder wires to each of the metal bands and then hook them into the Arduino to produce sound. However, the soldering is harder than you might think. The easiest way would be to use a bunch of solder arms, or a soldering iron gun, but I had neither. I only had the conventional soldering iron and solder. So, after many tries and retries, I got each wire to the solder with the right band, and none of the solder was touching two bands at once.

Once you have that done, plug the gnd into gnd and the middle into an I/O and the top into an I/O. Now you need to program it. See the code for programming.