Comment by hlandau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hlandau | Hacker News Reader

This post touches on a fairly common experience for me, which is assuming a kind of product must exist and then being surprised to find a complete gap in the market.

It seems quite common for a particular market to have come to "conceptualise" itself, or categorise itself, in a certain way that then becomes a prevailing set of assumptions of every company serving that market. This results in every product in a given market basically being the same and formed under the same set of assumptions, leading to a lack of meaningful choice.

Examples I've encountered:

- You can't get non-wireless (/non-battery-powered) noise cancelling headphones. Go on, try and find some.

- The market for presentation remote controls (that is, wireless clickers for advancing to the next slide) seems to be entirely conceptualised around proprietary 2.4GHz communication with one of those tiny USB dongles. The market for Bluetooth presentation remote controls seems to be tiny, and the ones that do support Bluetooth are hybrids which support both Bluetooth and a dongle. Also weirdly expensive.

- You can get Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors but getting Zigbee temperature/humidity/pressure sensors is seemingly much more niche, despite the existence of MEMS chips which can sense all of those. Zigbee temperature, humidity, pressure and CO2? Good luck.

Given how neat and useful Zigbee is as a technology I'm a bit surprised more isn't done with it and a more varied set of devices aren't available for it.

[RE: noise canceling headphones]

[I am not an electrical engineer]

I think that noise canceling headphones require at least one microphone, some op-amps, and some digital circuitry to sample analog signals, process those samples, and then perform digital to analog conversion to put the canceling signal back in the audio stream.

Line level audio, can't power all that. Not enough current. Not enough voltage. So you need a battery or USB or a wall wart.

Or you put some big ear pads on ordinary headphones...I have some for my ATH-MX50's I bought on eBay. They are about an inch think and filter out a lot of ambient sound. But perhaps I digress.

Or maybe not. Thick earpads provide passive noise reduction without batteries and a set of ATH-MX50's plus earpads will set you back about $200, but you might get by with less expensive MX-30's or even MX-20's...indeed, some MX-20's plus some thick earpads from eBay is the simplest thing that might work.

> You can't get non-wireless (/non-battery-powered) noise cancelling headphones. Go on, try and find some.

https://www.bose.com/p/headphones-aviation-headsets/bose-a30...

The six-pin LEMO connector carries both power and audio.

Aerospace headsets... yeah, helicopter headsets might be the one case where you actually can find cable-powered active noise cancelling. But you're a long way out of the consumer sector at that point...

>You can't get non-wireless (/non-battery-powered) noise cancelling headphones. Go on, try and find some.

Well, you'll need battery or USB power at the headphone anyway. And bringing in a connection from a computer is a great way to bring in noise over the power or jack without proper filtering.

Also I'm 99% sure my Sony and Bose noise cancelling phones had an input jack (mini?) that could be plugged in to devices.

I can add to this: there is an unsatisfied need of a headset with overear hooks, for sports (waterproof), without touch controls and with the connecting string (so, not separate per year). The backbeat fit was this product, it's now dismissed and the replacement are all "true wireless" (which means one per ear, like airpods) and there are a whole bunch of reddit threads about it.

I had to give up and buy one of those true wireless, but of course the controls are touch which is terrible for many sports: I do shadow boxing and whenever I simulate dodges and cover my ear, the song gets paused. Lovely.

The overear hooks are a necessity or with some movements the headset gets shot out of the ear

I use the Shokz Openrun Pro for this use case. Not waterproof enough for swimming (according to the manual), but I sweat like the Colorado River and they handle that just fine. They are bone conducting, not in ear, which is a feature for me, because I'm mostly cycling.

Yeah that brand was interesting, but I'm looking for the opposite, I'm in a gym and want to eliminate sound, so bone conducting doesn't work

You could add earplugs.

I did not think about that, although i do wonder if earplugs would ve ejected from the ears with the right move, similar to "true wireless in ear headsets without hooks"

Not to counter your point, but because your said to try to find some, searching 'wired noise cancelling headphones'in Google immediately found options[1], although it was annoying to find the actually wired ones in the results, that do seem to exist.

[1] e.g. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-noise-canceling-wired-on-e...

The wired earbuds that shipped with my Samsung phone are noise canceling as well

Those are battery powered, though. (And judging by the reviews not very good, and suspiciously cheap, so not really the same quality of product.)

I spent a LONG time looking for wired noise-cancelling headphones a year or two ago without success. By this I mean headphones where the noise-cancelling electronics can be powered over USB. It seemed obvious to me to design a pair of headphones with a USB audio interface which powered noise cancelling. But nope, doesn't exist.

Even worse all the wireless noise cancelling headphones I find, including high end ones, automatically turn off when you charge them. So you can't actually use them when they're charging. I'm certain companies do this due to some kind of liability paranoia about a battery igniting when someone's wearing them, but the result is that the entire product class seems to be literally designed to put an upper bound on how much you can use the product. I find this insane.

> By this I mean headphones where the noise-cancelling electronics can be powered over USB

Sennheiser's noise cancelling headphones do this. Bose's noise canceling headphones cannot be turned on when charging.

> The market for presentation remote controls

What I don't get is why Google slides (or powerpoint online) doesn't have the ability to use your phone as a remote. It would seem like it should be something already built in but maybe i'm missing it or something.

There are various apps that let you do this, including the open source kde connect. Google slides or PowerPoint (online or desktop) all use the arrow keys to advance, so it's super easy to integrate with. The app just connects to a tiny desktop program that pretends to be a keyboard.

Unfortunately, I use a variety of computers in different classrooms and I can't really install software on them since I'm not an admin.

Keynote has had this basically since the iPhone existed

re: presentation remote controls:

  Look into remote controls for, say, Kodi.  You're sure to find the wiki listing a bunch of ways to control Kodi from your couch, which includes bluetooth remotes of various flavors that should meet your needs.

re: zigbee being underused:

  ...they're expensive.  I don't know if it's licensing or what, but zigbee SoCs are 5-10x the cost of, say, an ESP32 wifi SoC. $10ish each vs $1.25 ea at a quick glance.

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