There's some nights when I have trouble sleeping, either because of the TV someone else's watching, my sibling's snoring, or an annoying fly.
It's one of those problems where I wouldn't actively spend any money trying to fix it but I do welcome an easy fix.
About a year ago, my brother bought some foam ear tips for his earbuds and left the box with the rest laying around. Today I saw that box and I thought to change my IEM's eartips too.
When I put them on, I tested the isolation and I found that it's pretty good and that it would make good earplugs.
Sleeping earplugs already exist: Loop makes the most popular ones. They are marketed towards avoiding public noise, sound protection for party-goers and musicians and, of course, fellow eepers.
I immediately opened Makerworld to find that, indeed, someone had
copied the Loop to fit any eartips. I wasted no time in sending them over to my P2S!
I first printed the 1.5mm diameter option, but the eartips went in too easily and I got scared that they would get stuck inside my ears. The 1.75mm also spooked me, so I ended up printing the 2mm version fit much more reassuringly. They took around 22 minutes per pair to print at 0.08mm layer height.
Only after printing three versions of them did I realize that they had a hole to let a bit of sound in (this is good for partying/social situations, but not great for my use case), so I solved it via cutting a section of the filament I'd used to print the earplugs, feeding it into one of those 3D pens that were popular around a decade ago and squirting some hot PLA into the holes. I then prettied them up by squishing the 200ºC plastic with my fingers.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how much they isolate now and I would totally recommend this half-hour project.
