Ploopy Headphones Toolbox is an application for configuring the filtering applied by the Ploopy Headphones DAC without having to rebuild the firmware.
To use this tool you will need to be running a firmware image build from the headphones-toolbox branch, prebuilt binaries are available here.
This is an Beta test version of Ploopy Headphones Toolbox, it is pretty functional at this point but there are still a few planned bits which are not implemented. Feel free to raise defects, pull requests or leave feedback over on r/ploopy.
Grab a firmware image from here and flash it onto your DAC. Grab a build of Ploopy Headphones Toolbox from here and install it on your PC.
If you are a Linux user you will need to set a udev rule to allow users to access the USB device. As root, run:
echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2e8a", ATTRS{idProduct}=="fedd", MODE="666"' > /etc/udev/rules.d/100-ploopy-headphones.rules`
udevadm control --reload-rules && udevadm trigger
If you are a MacOS user, you may need to brew install libusb. The application is not signed so you will see warning messages.
Run the application, it should detect your device. Click the + button to add a configuration, when you modify the filters the frequency response graph and the filters running on the device will change in real time. If you start playing some music, then change the filters you can hear the result instantly. WARNING: Keep the volume low, and be cautious making changes as filers can cause the sound to become very loud. If you come up with a config you like, click the save button in the top right to persist the configuration to flash memory.
You can export your faviourite configurations to JSON files and share them with others.
The application is currently in Beta status. I have now implemented all of the functionality I planned for the first release, it just wants testing.
Missing functionality:
- Not many errors are reported to the user.
Implemented functionality:
- Device discovery.
- Microsoft OS descriptor 2.0 support, auto loads the winusb driver so we can configure the device.
- Reboot device into bootloader (on Windows this reqires that you are already running a toolbox firmware).
- Set a new device configuration and listen to the effect in real time.
- Save the configuration to flash.
- Load configs from flash.
- Import/Export configs for sharing.
- Read the configuration back from the device.
- Configure the PCM3060 filters.
- Reports device information to the user (version numbers etc..)
- Validates the firmware version is supported.
- Completely custom Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filters
Known issues:
- There is a burst of audio noise when when writing a config to flash, this seems to be due to the time it takes to write to flash. I turn the DAC off then back on to mask it, the slight pop sounds much better.
The application is build using Tauri, Quasar and a little Rust. These were picked for consistency with QMK who are using the same combination for their upcoming xap client application. The user interface itself is build with standard web technologies (vue3, quasar, html. typescript).
To build the application from scratch in developer mode you will need to install nodejs and yarn, then run:
yarn install
yarn tauri dev
Once started the application will automatically update when you change the code.
The Windows dev environment setup is a little more involved, and consists of the following steps:
- Install node.js from here: https://nodejs.org/en
- When prompted in the installer, allow it to install the "additional dev tools", which will open a PowerShell script and do stuff for a while.
- Install Yarn, using the instructions found here: https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/install
- Open a Node.js command prompt and navigate to the headphones-toolbox repo directory. You should be able to successfully run yarn install now.
- Follow the instructions at https://tauri.app/v1/guides/getting-started/prerequisites/ to install Rust.
- Open a Node.js command prompt; you can find this in your start menu, in the Node.js folder. Navigate to the source repository directory and run the following commands:
yarn install
yarn tauri dev
- To build the app into an installer, use the command:
yarn tauri build