Very nice job! I love reading about hardware projects like this but stumble across the write-ups much less frequently/reliably compared to interesting software projects. Are there good groups/lists/sites to hear about more electronic/hardware hacking like this?
I made a smart watch from scratch
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Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#82We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways.
Although unfortunately not solved, we've made great strides in regards to child mortality, extreme poverty, war, violence, health, freedom, literacy... If you could choose any point in human history to be born, you'd be best off choosing today.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Max-Roser-three-facts...
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#83Very nice job! I love reading about hardware projects like this but stumble across the write-ups much less frequently/reliably compared to interesting software projects. Are there good groups/lists/sites to hear about more electronic/hardware hacking like this?
All sorts of interesting projects on Hackaday: https://hackaday.com/
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#84We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways.
We've possessed the technology and resources to solve the first two for at least a decade, but it's unclear how doing so would increase share-holder value.
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#85The DA14683 is fantastic. I played a bit with an eval. board and it's really good for it's price vs. features (~$3 for 250 pcs. at Mouser). But soon the idea of releasing code for it as Open Source faded away, since you need to sign an SLA ( https://support.dialog-semiconductor.com/connectivity/reques... ), that limits the way source code based on their in SDK is released (only to your customer, in an only “need to k…
Does anyone know how this compares to the nRF5x series (and/or other BLE-friendly microcontrollers)?
It does look very similar to the nrf52 line. The nrf52850 even has double the SRAM (256kb).
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#86Congrats! Making it round was a good design decision! Who would think a square (or squircle) watch is good watch design anyway? ;)
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#87We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways.
Homeless, poverty, cancer, or war are all people problems, and people are complicated. We do have flying cars but they're not very good at flying or driving.
The “we don’t have flying cars” argument always strikes me as begging for something to complain about. We could easily have flying cars if there was literally one reason to have a flying car. There is not a single reason to have a flying car, so no one has put in the time to make one because no one would buy it because it’s pointless.
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
And assuming they didn't merge their fork back in, the original FreeRTOS codebase doesn't get any of their fixes/improvements either.
And there is nothing stopping you from taking the original GPL'd FreeRTOS codebase and merging in all of the MIT licensed improvements. If you make a better FreeRTOS, that's what people will use. I've seen this happen many times in open source. For example, to this day LGPL's LibreOffice, which started as a fork of OpenOffice, reviews all OpenOffice patches and cherry picks the good ones.[1] On the other hand, Apache…
For what it's worth, LibreOffice is probably LGPL because of OpenOffice's history with the Oracle buy-out. Oracle gave OpenOffice to Apache for the same reason Google gave Wave to Apache: They run a sort-of paliative service for software projects.
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homeless, poverty, cancer, or war are all people problems, and people are complicated. We do have flying cars but they're not very good at flying or driving.
The “we don’t have flying cars” argument always strikes me as begging for something to complain about. We could easily have flying cars if there was literally one reason to have a flying car. There is not a single reason to have a flying car, so no one has put in the time to make one because no one would buy it because it’s pointless.
Flying cars would be a great solution to congestion.
Assuming perfect reliability, reasonably low sound levels, super high efficiency engines, and flying pigs.
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Women's clothes don't have pockets. Always having an active LTE modem strapped to my wrist makes me feel safer. It is easy to be separated from my phone because I don't have pockets.
Why do women put up with that?
The clothes look good and women look fantastic in them.