Ken Pillonel’s mission is to encourage individuals and hardware manufacturers to give the right importance to the repairability of products and that’s what he did when he made an iPhone and a pair of AirPods with USB-C connectivity, finally about to be adopted by Apple with the new iPhone 15. And that’s what the young Swiss engineering student has returned to do by minimizing the case of a pair of AirPods Pro to make a repairable version. All accompanied by free projects to allow DIY enthusiasts with engineering skills to do the same.
“It is worrying to see design choices such as non-replaceable batteries, glued components and a lack of transparency in public information leading to the rise of ‘fast electronics.'”
Ken Pillonel”
To demonstrate how easy it is to make a gadget like the AirPods Pro repairable, Pillonel has broken down the case to make models of the different parts, using a three-dimensional scanner for sections characterized by atypical curves, and then fixing everything with screws and nuts. In this way he managed to make the battery easily replaceable by enriching his work started previously with the creation of a custom printed circuit board to equip the case of the AirPods Pro with USB-C connectivity (the project can be purchased online).
In explaining his project to colleagues at The Verge, the engineering student admitted that he still used glue, albeit to a lesser extent than Apple’s design, to fix some magnets. But apparently he used cyanoacrylic glue that can be removed using acetone, a far cry from the Apple glue Pillonel compared to cement.
For the moment, the change only concerns the case of the first-generation AirPods Pro. Pillonel has not yet managed to disassemble the case of the second generation model without causing damage. It also does not have the necessary tools to modify the earbuds which are additional difficult due to the small size. But we can expect news in this regard in the near future. On the other hand, even if the schemes are accessible, Pillonel has made his passion an economic activity through Patreon.