SoundBrake 2.0 device makes headphone users less oblivious
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
Surely a modern phone CPU can do audio processing a great deal faster than a common microcontroller. Plus it would be far easier to keep the phone charged than to worry about a second device running out of battery.
Plus, a separate device allows you to use it with your laptop or your phone.
I don't think that kind of audio processing would be an issue for battery life. They're able to do everything on a coin-sized battery in their system. From their prototype pics, they're using this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1572
That's a 120mAh coin cell that they say lasts for 50 hours. They might be using something different in their final product, but we can safely assume that their algorithm isn't super power-hungry and running a small mic isn't going to do anything to your 3000-something mAh phone battery.
Obviously implementing this is a higher-level language like Java is going to incur some overhead, when compared to their microcontroller implementation... But the point is, they're not doing some advanced pattern matching on a database of sounds or anything that's going to use crazy amounts of CPU-time.
> Better to run out of battery on a third-party device than your phone.
I disagree on that - it's really easy to remember to charge my phone. I do it every single night. Other devices that I don't use for days at a time are easy to forget about.
> a separate device allows you to use it with your laptop or your phone.
True - it would need to be ported to work on those platforms.