Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

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I'm an EE by trade, and my work has shipped in numerous consumer products. I was lead hardware designer for Sonos Amp, Sonos Port, and a few of the IKEA/Sonos collaboration products.

I've since moved on from that job, but it's a very cool resume item. It's also a pretty cool shameless self promotion thing to point out when I need to.

Was asked by an executive why I should run a hardware development effort at my current company and my pitch was: "Because I've designed and shipped more circuit boards than everyone else at this 500 person company combined. You probably own some of them." Turns out that said executive just got his new house wired with Sonos Amps.

Since I mostly work from home these days, I've done some fun little projects around radio just to prove that I can. I made a little AM receiver with 74xx series logic inspired by a post I saw on HN, and now I'm working on a digitally tuned FM receiver with a Si5351 as LO and an STM32 as controller/HMI.

Similar story in manufacturing automation, with a lot of automotive especially.

It's fun to drive around and see F150 doors and Subaru seats and Toyota mirrors and BMW center consoles and on and on that I assembled.

Or rather, that machines running code I wrote assembled a small part of. It's definitely a different feeling of satisfaction when a machine I was a critical part of for a few weeks years ago churns out value while I sleep versus something I made with my hands and hand tools which would take an identical amount of time to repeat.

This is one of my favorite parts of creating things. I then go and see them around town and go to myself "Oh I made that or this! Cool!"

I made an instructable on how to hack the sonos ikea speaker to get a line level aux out. What do you think of it? Imo its probably wrong electrically speaking summing the low and high frequency lines, but it sounds pretty good after truplay tuning.

https://www.instructables.com/Cheaper-Sonos-Architectural-Wi...

What do you think about the longevity of these Sonos products? I got sucked into the ecosystem via IKEA/Sonos collab and now added one to my TV setup.

The ecosystem is nice _currently_ but do you think the hardware+software will be useable in 5,10,15 years from now? Do you think it could be liberated software wise. Thinking about this because I am contemplating moving my vinyl setup to Sonos as well.

The hardware will absolutely still be useable. The hardware quality bar is very very high.

Our app usability sucked then (and still does now), but plenty of our products met and exceeded ten or fifteen year lifetimes.

One of the biggest issues we faced when I was there was trying to support devices shipped in 2002 that didn't have enough RAM to run features being shipped in 2016! Newer products shouldn't have that issue. They ship with tooooons of RAM for fear of that situation popping up again.

I have ten year old Sonos gear that still works. The feature I wish the speakers had most? A line in jack so I could use them with something other than apps. That is a kind of future proofing all powered speakers should have.

The Sonos product team had a completely unexplainable aversion to line in jacks, to the point where you almost weren't even allowed to discuss it.

I suspect it was a lot of fairly self-interested resume padding for some PM resumes. Nobody there was going to make their next career move as "innovators" shipping a technology that'd been perfected for fortyish years before them.

And here we have the person who knows how to graft one onto the PCB. Is that possible?

Probably, but I don't have the time, interest, or access to the PCB files any more.

I think you'd be out of luck in most cases anyway, as we almost always used I2S as our audio interface of choice. If we didn't have a use for the RX line (i.e. The audio input line) of the I2S interface, it generally wasn't broken out of the SoC fanout.

What's more: we didn't generally enable driver support for I2S receive in products that didn't use it. There simply isn't a use for it.

Furthermore, you probably wouldn't be able to modify the app stack to use that data if you somehow did figure out all the needed kernel mods. Sonos deployed Secure Boot and signed app updates starting in 2013, because they realized they were potentially selling a botnet for hire if they didn't have a good way to secure their players.

I'd settle for a line-in straight into the power amp. No integration of any kind into the existing Sonos ecosystem. Make them dumb - because the speakers do sound great for their size.

You can probably figure this out by looking at the chip pinouts of the relevant amps, though most of the ones we used were I2S in.

I believe both the old and the new Sonos Amp have line-in inputs which can then be shared as the source with other Sonos units.

I think there was a dedicated Sonos line-in unit that was cheaper than the Amp, but I can’t recall its name.

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/use-line-in-on-sonos

That's the Sonos Port! I made that too!

I recently added a new Sonos Beam to my TV and used Sonos One speakers from 2017 to serve as my rears. While Sonos has done some weird stuff with old product retirement in the past, being able to pair 6 year old speakers with current hardware was delightful and restored my faith in Sonos product longevity.

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