So how long before someone starts buying up covid tests to strip these out again and resell to the supply chain challenged?
There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
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Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#12.
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#13Do we have Doom running on it?
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#14Do we have Doom running on it?
as mentioned in the thread it would need more RAM to do so
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#15So how long before someone starts buying up covid tests to strip these out again and resell to the supply chain challenged?
The tests are not cheap
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#16I worked at a company that was using these chips to control doors. They're extremely cheap chips, but writing code for them is not pleasant. Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Props to the devs who helped put this together.
At that point, why not just use something like the original SoC from the Raspberry Pi 1 and use the plethora of Linux dev tools available?
Cost, power, board complexity, reliability.
Embedded development is much different than what a lot of developers are used to.
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
At that point, why not just use something like the original SoC from the Raspberry Pi 1 and use the plethora of Linux dev tools available?
Cost, power, board complexity, reliability. Embedded development is much different than what a lot of developers are used to.
Also availability. The more basic the chip, the easier / faster it is to get 1k of them. (or to find a perfect/close match requiring minimal changes)
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#18Nordic is not really that cheap if you just want a Cortex-M4. You buy Nordic parts for their radios. If you just want processing power, GigaDevices has an M4 at less than $1 last I checked. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work for the design we were working on as the standby power consumption wasn't great.
I don't think they wanted an M4 per se, but instead wanted a bluetooth radio to save on the cost of a screen. The Nordic chip just happens to be based around an M4.
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#19funny there's a chip shortage for certain chips. yet here are disposable chips...
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#20I worked at a company that was using these chips to control doors. They're extremely cheap chips, but writing code for them is not pleasant. Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Props to the devs who helped put this together.
At that point, why not just use something like the original SoC from the Raspberry Pi 1 and use the plethora of Linux dev tools available?
Really not the same beasts. The Cortex M4 microcontroller is self-contained with every peripheral it needs (including BT and wireless stack) and its power consumption is very small compared to a SoC.
Also, it's not booting Linux at all. For these simplish one-purpose applications, you don't want the overhead and it probably would need more than the 24k or RAM onboard the nRF52810.
They could be using Zephyr though as it supports the Cortex M4 (it's a linux-like RTOS that can be heavily customised).