With nights drawing in, many people particularly in the northern parts of the world are being affected by seasonal affective disorder. A Finnish company called Valkee claims to cure the winter blues with its bright light headset. According to the company, shining a bright torch in your ears has been shown to have a therapeutic effect.
I won’t comment on the bogosity of Valkee’s claims. I did, however, decide to see how cheaply I could build something similar to their £185 device.
My headset isn’t the same as Valkee’s. Theirs seems to use fiber optic, presumably to keep the size and temperature down. Mine uses ultra-bright LEDs. Their’s has a fancy timer. Mine doesn’t. Theirs has a rechargeable battery. Mine draws its power from a USB socket.
On with the show!
The LED dimmer uses a headphone volume control (from Maplin, although cheaper elsewhere) as it provides a handy stereo dimmer in a neat case, and with a suitable 3.5mm socket already included! I replaced the 3.5mm jack with a USB A plug so the dimmer can draw power from any USB port.
The insides of the dimmer are simple. A couple of simple modifications will be needed to make them drive the LEDs.
This is the underside of the dimmer circuit. I had to cut a couple of traces to turn it from a headphone volume controller into a LED controller.
The LEDs run off 3 volts (I think). A couple of resistors in series with the dimmer limit the maximum current through the LEDs.
The 3.5mm jack is replaced by a USB A plug. This provides an easy 5V supply. If I’m not near a PC, I also have a selection of batteries and power supplies with a USB socket.
This is the dimmer put back together. Small and neat, no?
The earphones cost a couple of pounds on eBay. They’re made of metal and are surprisingly well put together. I tried to choose a model which looked like it could be taken apart easily. This took a bit of prying and twisting (which scratched the cases a bit) but eventually they came apart just fine. I’m sure the sound quality is pretty poor but we’re taking the speakers out so it doesn’t matter.
I ripped the speaker elements out and fitted ultrabright white LEDs in their place. The LEDs are glued into place with epoxy. Because the phones are made of metal, I insulated the LED leads with some heatshrink.
The earphone leads are soldered into the LEDs.
The earphones are glued back together with epoxy. The rubber tips are still out in this picture.
The phones fully assembled and working. The rubber tips fit around the LEDs, with the lights protruding a little. They are fairly comfortable in the ears. The dimmer gives a good range of brightnesses. In this picture they are quite dim. At their brightest, they really are quite bright.
5 Comments
Cool. Do they work, would be interested in a full parts list including led specs as unsure which to buy. Thanks
Nice build!
Finally I found someone else with the same idea – £185 is a little too expensive for something that MIGHT work with simple led’s :)
I made my own a couple of days ago, also with cheap phones and led’s. Mine is a little simpler though without a dimmer, a resistor and directly connected to a 12v adapter. Two bright 15000 mcd led’s serve as lightsources.
I’m thinking about building another one with 1w power led’s because the intensity may not be enough to penetrate the inner parts of the ear and reach the photosensitive parts of the brain. But I will wait and see if the first build is causing any moodshifts. When I use the phones I feel “something”, can be placebo though.
How’s it going with your phones? Noticed any difference in mood?
Sorry to both of you for my abysmal reply times.
First of all, I have tried to find the posters/papers about Valkee and I can’t say I’m convinced by the evindence. This paper describes a trial where they tested various power levels of Valkee, they found that ‘any’ light level tested was equally effective — yet they didn’t test light level zero. Surely the obvious conclusion is that if the light level doesn’t matter, then the effect can be explained by placebo? The rest of the trials seem to address small pieces of a puzzle without daring to make a big claim.
For what it’s worth, the LED system is probably in the lower end of the scale, clocking in at around 1 lumen. But if we are to believe the research, there’s no advantage to boosting the light output by a factor of nine.
Here is their “peer-reviewed methodology paper”. It states:
Almost immediately below, they say:
I’m no expert on research methodology, but how do these two statements square up?
A bit on LEDs:
Craig, I used CREE C503C-WAN-CBADA151 LEDs from Farnell. They used to be available but seem to be discontinued now. Any similarly size and brightness LED should work (or not, as the case may be.)
Dave, I would not stick 1W LEDs in my ears. I suspect Valkee use fibre optic for thermal reasons. A mobile phone (or any handheld device for that matter) can only dissipate about 6W over its whole surface area without getting too hot to handle. With that in mind, would you really want a 1-watt heater in your ear canal?
Finally, I haven’t actually used this thing beyond testing it once or twice, so I can’t comment on how well it performs on me. Like I said, though, having looked at the evidence I’m not too hopeful.
Hi,
I’m gonna try and make one of these but with a twist; joule thief to make use of old batteries.
Thanks // https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_thief