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What about Smoke Detectors, since they too are a disposable electronic?
You throw away your smoke detector? Just replace the battery. My guy is out here pulling off the whole thing and tossing it in the trash.
Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_d…
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The micro in this thing is a WQFN-16 (W = very very thin, thinner than V for very) with 3x3x0.75mm body. That's around a fiftieth of a gram of plastic. I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway. In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the co…
The mfg/mining process for the chips is probably equally bad. All for a device to help you develop health problems.
I am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong. This…
I can't fathom why disposables are legal. Really believed that the post-boomer generations actually gave a damn about waste.
Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
> Dick writes of the IoT being a source of vast-artificial-living-systems functioning on collective compute.
Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere.
Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
Makes me think of these: https://duskos.org https://collapseos.org
I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it. Yet?
3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom unfortunately. It has been ported to another Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, the RP2040, but that has 264kb of RAM plus megabytes of flash and the game still barely fits.
You can play Doom on an Atari 2600: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/323152-doom-the-2600-demak...
Just need to outboard a little extra RAM.
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VPS with public ipv4, connected to home network over Tailscale and forward the traffic with socat. You'd probably be fine opening a port directly but a small VPS is free most places so might as well make the most of it.
Could you elaborate more on the "a small VPS is free"? Except Oracle's free tier offer, I am not aware of others; I'd appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.